A Research On History Of Classical Probability

The scholars have always thought the reseach of history is great important. The great philosopher Francis Bacon in the time of Renaissance said that "Histories make men wise" and the great Chinese thinker Confucius's words of wisdom "Learn the new while reviewing the old" is very familiar for every Chinese person. Therefore, it is no doubt that the importance of study of history. This is a MA dissertation about the history of classical probability, the basic line of idea of this paper is from the study and calculation of gambling and random phenomenon to the emphasis of this article—the Bernoulli's Law of Large Numbers and de Moivre's Central Limit Theorem. This thesis describes the early history of classical probability in very detailed way and carefully makes the process of its development clear.This paper consists of six chapters, the basic contents are as follows:Chapter 1, Introduction. This chapter discusses the significance of this paper's study and the present situation of research of home and abroad in this field. Finally we gives a brief introduction of the development of the history of classical probability events.Chapter 2, The Foundation of Probability Theory. This chapter discusses the long history of gambling and the process of understanding of random events for human beings, we also describes the famous "division problem" and gives a brief introduction of the life of Cardano and his famous book The Book on Games of Chance. At Last, we detailed discuss Pascal and Fermat's work for the foundation of probability theory.Chapter 3, The First Textbook of Probability Theory—De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae. This chapter describes the Huygens's life and his contribution to the development of probability theory, discusses his 14 propositions and the 5 questions in De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae. This great paper has been used for a probability theory textbook nearly 50 years.Chapter 4, The History and Solutions of Some Well-Known Classical Probability Problems. This chapter discusses several classical probability models, including the problem of points, Waldegrave's problem, and Her problem. Finally we gives some other classical probability problems which also come from famous book in history.Chapter 5, Out of Gambling—James Bernoulli·Ars Conjectandi-The Law of Large Numbers. This chapter is about the Bernoulli's Law of Large Numbers and we give James Bernoulli's life, we main describe his book Ars Conjectandi and the Law of Large Numbers.Chapter 6, The Classical Central Limit Theorem. This chapter is about de Moivre and his book The Doctrine of Chances. The Bernoulli's Law of Large Numbers and de Moivre's Normal Approximation to the Binomial are the foundation of probability coming out of gambling. The research of probability is no longer limited in gambling but extends to all aspects of economy and society.At last, we give a a brief summary of the complete contents of this paper.