David Aubin; Catherine Goldstein (Editors). The War of Guns and Mathematics: Mathematical Practices and Communities in France and Its Western Allies around World War I. (History of Mathematics, 42.) xviii + 391 pp., figs., tables, index. Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, 2014. $126 (cloth).

Isis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 218-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy MacLeod
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
American Mathematical Society ◽  
Mathematical Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Mathematical Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Mathematics

The Remarkable Story

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven J. Osterlind
Keyword(s):  
Probability Theory ◽  
World War I ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Conditional Probabilities ◽  
World War ◽  
Bell Curve ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Napoleonic Era ◽  
And Mathematics

This chapter introduces the extraordinary story of “quantification,” the perception of seeing things—both the everyday and the extraordinary—through the lens of quantifiable events (i.e., via odds, probability, and likelihood). This concept arose when people learned how to measure uncertainty, through the development of probability theory. The chapter presents many examples of using probability for measuring uncertainty and sets the historical context for the following chapters by showing how the idea of quantification developed during a relatively brief period in history, roughly from the end of Napoleonic era through the start of World War I. This era saw a torrent of mathematical developments, specifically, the invention of probability theory, the bell curve, regressions, Bayesian conditional probabilities, and psychometrics. The chapter also explains that this book is not a history of probability theory but a story of how history and mathematics came together to fashion the current worldview.

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