Probability theory began in seventeenth century France when the two great French mathematicians, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, corresponded over two problems from games of chance. Problems like those Pascal and Fermat solved continued to influence such early researchers as Huygens, Bernoulli, and DeMoivre in establishing a mathematical theory of probability. Today, probability theory is …
This book was expanded from lecture materials I use in a one semester upper-division undergradu- ate course entitled Probability and Statistics at Youngstown State University. Those lecture mate- rials, in turn, were based on notes that I transcribed as a graduate student at Bowling Green State University. The course for which the materials were written is 50-50 Probability and Statistics, and …