The bell curve and the concept of standard deviations arrived, after much tedious experimentation, in the 19th century-and are very much with us still, in political polling, for instance, and in the analysis of stocks. Games dominated theories of risk for a long while, until the English began analyzing death records, resulting in the first actuarial tables, and the Dutch did the same with the successes and failures of merchant shipping. Modern risk theory dates from a little geometric model invented in 1654 called Pascal's Triangle, which Blaise Pascal used to address a perennial intellectual question: If two participants quit a game of chance before finishing, how is the pot divided? Pascal's Triangle answered the question by showing the proportions of probable outcomes at any given stage of a game. A history of probability from an economist and author of a history of Wall Street (Capital Ideas, 1991).
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