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His original purpose was parochial: to automate the production of tables of mathematical functions such as logarithms and cosines, which were heavily used in navigation and engineering.
David Deutsch • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
Jacob Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers. Bernoulli had codified the principle that while it might be difficult to predict with certainty a single event, such as the death of a particular person, it was possible to predict with great accuracy the average outcome of many similar events.
Yuval Noah Harari • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Pierre de Fermat,
Stephen Budiansky • Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
Pythagoras, as everyone knows, said that “all things are numbers.” This statement, interpreted in a modern way, is logically nonsense, but what he meant was not exactly nonsense. He discovered the importance of numbers in music, and the connection which he established between music and arithmetic survives in the mathematical terms “ harmonic mean”
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
The scheme he devised made it possible to convert any string of symbols used to express a mathematical or logical formula in Principia Mathematica into a single, unique integer.
Stephen Budiansky • Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
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By rights, Bayes’ rule should be named for someone else: a Frenchman, Pierre Simon Laplace, one of the most powerful mathematicians and scientists in history. To deal with an unprecedented torrent of data, Laplace discovered the rule on his own in 1774.
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne • The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
According to the central limit theorem, proven in 1810 by Pierre-Simon Laplace, any such random process—one that amounts to a sum of a large number of coin flips—will lead to the same probability distribution, called the normal distribution (or bell-shaped curve). The Galton board is simply a visual demonstration of Laplace’s theorem.