The Book on Games of Chance: The 16th-Century Treatise on Probability (Dover Recreational Math)

We are somewhere before 1578, Cardano is writing about his experiences with games of chance way before theory of probability was defined on rigorous terms. He was well read, aware of the perils of being a gambler even making references to Aristotle, Seneca and ancient games. But this is a short book where he lists the ratios for all probable outcomes with 2 and 3 dice. As a result, he concludes that the confidence one throws the dice has no influence on her/his luck. Dices are governed by pure chance but cards demand skills like memory and fast reasoning to predict future outcomes. But he doesn't go deep on card games. The fun here comes from his genuine struggle to understand chance. After reading this booklet, one should feel very lucky to be alive after clever people like Pascal, Fermat, Laplace and Kolmogorov.

Needed this book for a report I was doing for college math. It suited my needs but I found the writing to be pretty uninteresting personally.

Great!!!