HUYGENS, Christiaan.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Van Rekeningh in Spelen van Geluck. First edition in Dutch of the first printed work in probability, appearing as an appendix to Schooten's mathematical treatises. "The treatise by Huygens continued to form the best account of the subject until it was superseded by the more elaborate works of James Bernoulli, Montmort, and De Moivre" (Todhunter, p. 25). Bernoulli reprinted the treatise with his own commentary in Ars conjectandi, 1713."Having heard about Pascal's work in probability problems, Huygens himself took up their study in 1656. This resulted in the Tractatus de ratiociniis... a treatise that remained the only book on the subject until the eighteenth century. In his first theorems Huygens... introduced as a fundamental concept the expectation of a stochastic variable rather than the probability of a process (to put in in modern terms). Subsequent theorems concern the fair distribution of the stakes when a game is broken off prematurely. The treatise closes with five problems, the last of which concerns expected duration of play" (DSB).Mathematishe Oeffeningen, to which the treatise is appended, comprises five treatises on various mathematical subjects; it was Schooten's principal mathematical work. "Book I contains elementary arithmetic and geometry problems... Book II is devoted to constructions using straight lines only and Book III to the reconstruction of Apollonius' Plane Loci on the basis of hints given by Pappus. Book IV is a revised version of Schooten's treatm

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