Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Everyone’s heard of Galileo and how the Church persecuted him. But what I didn’t know was why . Sure, Christianity considered the earth to be the center of the universe, but was that such a central belief of Christianity that they’d kill a guy over it? I always felt like there was something more to it. Like everything else in the Western world, the story starts in ancient Greece. Pythagoras believed the earth was at the center of the universe. The sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around the earth, with each pinned inside a sphere. How far did these spheres within spheres extend? To infinity? Or did they stop at some point? If they stopped, what lay beyond the last sphere? Aristotle denied the existence of both the void and the infinite. As far he was concerned, both the void and the infinite were just constructs of the mind: and he felt there’s nothing in the real world (universe) that was infinite. So Aristotle’s answer was that there were only a finite number of spheres and that...

The development of probability theory has interesting origins: it’s all connected to gambling! Born in 1445, Luca Paccioli, a Franciscan monk, posed the problem that came to be called the puzzle of the points: A and B are playing a game of balla. The first person to win 6 rounds wins. But the game has to be stopped when A had won 5 rounds and B has won 3 rounds. How should the money be divided in such an uncompleted game? Finding a way to solve this problem had implications far beyond gambling. After all, this question involves factoring what may happen in the future. To put it differently, what are the chances that B catches up and overtakes A if the game continued? Gamblers were always interested in this kind of question: which numbers show up more often in a throw of the dice? What are the odds of a particular number showing up when two dice are involved instead of one? Like all smart people, the gamblers didn’t just do such analysis themselves. They even tried asking mathematicians...