Classical Probability in the Enlightenment

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment PDF Author: Lorraine Daston
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691006444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
"This book presents a comprehensive, insightful survey of the history of probability, both in terms of its scientific and its social uses. . . . It represents a substantial contribution not only to the history of probability but also to our understanding of the Enlightenment in general".--Joseph W. Dauben, "American Scientist".

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment PDF Author: Lorraine Daston
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691006444
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
"This book presents a comprehensive, insightful survey of the history of probability, both in terms of its scientific and its social uses. . . . It represents a substantial contribution not only to the history of probability but also to our understanding of the Enlightenment in general".--Joseph W. Dauben, "American Scientist".

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, New Edition

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, New Edition PDF Author: Lorraine Daston
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691248516
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
An award-winning history of the Enlightenment quest to devise a mathematical model of rationality What did it mean to be reasonable in the Age of Reason? Enlightenment mathematicians such as Blaise Pascal, Jakob Bernoulli, and Pierre Simon Laplace sought to answer this question, laboring over a theory of rational decision, action, and belief under conditions of uncertainty. Lorraine Daston brings to life their debates and philosophical arguments, charting the development and application of probability theory by some of the greatest thinkers of the age. Now with an incisive new preface, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment traces the emergence of new kind of mathematics designed to turn good sense into a reasonable calculus.

Victorian Science in Context

Victorian Science in Context PDF Author: Bernard Lightman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226481111
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
Victorian Science in Context captures the essence of this fascination, charting the many ways in which science influenced and was influenced by the larger Victorian culture. Leading scholars in history, literature, and the history of science explore questions such as, What did science mean to the Victorians? For whom was Victorian science written? What ideological messages did it convey?

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment PDF Author: John Robertson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199591784
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.

Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought

Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought PDF Author: Victoria Wohl
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107050499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This book examines ancient Greek thinking about the probable, hypothetical, and counterfactual across a variety of disciplines (philosophy, science, politics, literature, art).

A History of the Central Limit Theorem

A History of the Central Limit Theorem PDF Author: Hans Fischer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387878572
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This study discusses the history of the central limit theorem and related probabilistic limit theorems from about 1810 through 1950. In this context the book also describes the historical development of analytical probability theory and its tools, such as characteristic functions or moments. The central limit theorem was originally deduced by Laplace as a statement about approximations for the distributions of sums of independent random variables within the framework of classical probability, which focused upon specific problems and applications. Making this theorem an autonomous mathematical object was very important for the development of modern probability theory.

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind PDF Author: Paul Erickson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604677X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

Keys to Play

Keys to Play PDF Author: Roger Moseley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520291247
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.

Futures & Ruins

Futures & Ruins PDF Author: Nina L. Dubin
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606060236
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In this timely and provocative study, Hubert Robert's paintings of urban ruins are interpreted as manifestations of a new consciousness of time, one shaped by the uncertainties of an economy characterized by the dread-inducing expansion of credit, frenzied speculation on the stock exchange, and bold ventures in real estate. As the favored artist of an enterprising Parisian elite, Robert is a prophetic case study of the intersections between aesthetics and modernity's dawning business culture. At the center of this lively narrative lie Robert's depictions of the ruins of Paris--macabre and spectacular paintings of fires and demolitions created on the eve of the French Revolution. Drawing on a vast range of materials, Futures & Ruins understands these artworks as harbingers of a modern appetite for destruction. The paintings are examined as expressions of the pleasures and perils of a risk economy. This captivating account--lavishly illustrated with rarely reproduced objects--recovers the critical significance of the eighteenth-century cult of ruins and of Robert's art for our times.

Normality

Normality PDF Author: Peter Cryle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022648419X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does—and doesn’t—mean to be normal.