Description

A compelling journey through history, mathematics, and philosophy, charting humanity’s struggle against randomness

Our lives are played out in the arena of chance. However little we recognize it in our day-to-day existence, we are always riding the odds, seeking out certainty but settling—reluctantly—for likelihood, building our beliefs on the shadowy props of probability. Chances Are is the story of man’s 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. 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 gamblers to military strategists to meteorologists to medical researchers, from blackjack to our own mortality.

About the Author

Michael Kaplan is a writer and filmmaker. He holds an undergraduate and Master's degrees in History from Harvard University. He finished graduate studies at the University of Oxford.He is the co-author alongside his mother, Ellen Kaplan, of theBozo Sapiens Why to Err Is Human and Chances Are... Adventures in Probability.He is currenlt a managing partner of Prospero, (a communications company with government and corporate clients in North America, Europe and Asia).