Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part.
Leibniz, 1703
Risk is very much part of life, be you a compulsive gambler or strongly risk adverse, risk is impossible to get away from. As the quote above says the past can be a guide to the future, but how good a guide? If it happened yesterday and the day before, will it happen again tomorrow? This book charts the increasing understanding of probability and management of risk from ancient times to the present day; from dice games to derivatives. How ideas developed for games of chance became applied to life insurance and economics, and on to increasing complex questions about how people actually react to risk. All-in-all this is an interesting and highly readable book, but how much better it would have been if it had included more maths. Clearly the approach of discussing mathematics without actually showing it has been taken very much to heart. The story, told through the lives and ideas of the discoverers, is very interesting and well told; but much of this story is about mathematics, and at least for me the book would have been so much better if more of it had been shown. Still a book well worth reading.
John Wiley & Sons, 384 pages
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