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Keynes was a probabilist. He also had other interesting attributes (he blew up trading his account after experiencing excessive opulence—people’s understanding of probability does not translate into their behavior).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto Book 1)
proofs in number theory can themselves be represented as propositions of number theory.
Stephen Budiansky • Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
Larry was an engineer’s engineer,
John Doerr • Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
But the professors understood that behind the goofiness was a formidable mathematical mind.
Steven Levy • In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
in general, an introductory textbook on probability is Richard Isaac’s The Pleasures of Probability.9
Thomas H. Davenport • Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics
Pierre de Fermat,
Stephen Budiansky • Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
Limit circles to fifteen members or less.
Scott Belsky • Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
Over the course of several summers in the late 1960s, Baum and Lloyd Welch, an information theorist working down the hall, developed an algorithm to analyze Markov chains, which are sequences of events in which the probability of what happens next depends only on the current state, not past events.