“Chance... the origin of the word itself is very possibly related to the falling of the dice from their box,—and certainly the first attempts at a theory of Chance arose from the general interest in gambling with dice.”

— Karl Pearson

"The Chances of Death" (1895)

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Karl Pearson 65

English mathematician and biometrician 1857–1936

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“While the moralists have boldly asserted that the service of the goddess Chance leads to a complete demoralisation of her worshippers... the mathematicians... start from the hypothesis that gambling is a game of chance—chance being defined in their own perfectly clear and definite sense. My object... is to show that chance in this sense... as it applies to the tossing of an unloaded coin, has no application to Monte Carlo roulette.”

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