New York University 4 credits Core: Structures of Thought & Society
Chance is a common word whose meaning can vary, but which generally applies to situations involving a certain amount of unpredictability. We all spend a lot of time and effort to evaluate and possibly increase our chances of success, or to minimize certain risks. If philosophical discussions about chance and randomness can be traced back to antiquity, probabilistic and statistical concepts appeared more recently in mathematics. The ambition of the theory of chance has been to deal rationally with this elusive notion. Starting with gambling strategies, the theory now applies to the core of almost all scientific and technical fields, including statistical and quantum mechanics, chaotic dynamics, phylogenetics, sociology, economics, risk management, and quality control. We will provide a broad introduction, organized as a journey in the history of ideas. We will investigate key concepts (including independence, expectation, confidence intervals, or tests), consider their applications to specific fields of science, and illustrate them by computer experiments. Readings include excerpts from Lucretius, Pascal, Hume, Laplace, Peirce, and Hacking.
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