Quote:
Originally Posted by sir_pudding
What we think of as "classical" probability didn't exist as a mature technology until the late 18th or early 19th century, as Bill points out above even Blaise Pascal had it wrong.
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In an early work, though. I believe he figured it out later. And you certainly have the start of applied statistics in the late 1600s and early 1700s.
After all, Kepler initially considered and rejected the idea of elliptical planetary orbits, spent something like a year computing and recomputing, and only then figured out that the data proved the model he had rejected. These things happen early in a research program.
Bill Stoddard