The twin disciplines of probability and statistics underpin almost every modern science and sketch the shape of most human activities, whether politics, economics, medicine, law, or sports. For gamblers, risk buyers, forensic experts, magicians, artificial intelligence researchers, doctors, or military strategists, probability's tangle of incomplete certainties presents less a burden than an enthralling challenge. Gazing into apparent chaos, they discern patterns as elegant (and purposeful) as those of a bevy of migrating swans, Chances Are ... is their story: a millennia-long search for the tools to manage the recurrent but unpredictable - to help us prevent, or at least mitigate, the seemingly random blows of disaster, disease, and injustice. Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan have written a wonderfully erudite and entertaining account of this search, tracing its course from the Romans' divining the secrets of their dice-based oracles to John Graunt's painstakingly working out the first actuarial tables in plague-scourged London; from the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo to war-gamers calmly destroying armies and nations. In these pages we meet the brilliant individuals who developed the first abstract formulations of probability as well as the intrepid visionaries who recognized their practical applications - from blackjack to our own mortality. Chances Are ... is a journey through history, mathematics, and philosophy, charting one of humanity's most ambitious and poignant endeavors: the struggle against randomness.
