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Against the Gods
: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein |
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Hardcover, 383 pages
Published by John Wiley & Sons
Publication date: October 1996
Dimensions (in inches): 1.37 x 9.35 x 6.41
ISBN: 0471121045
Synopsis:
In a narrative that reads like a novel, this work tells the story of a group of famous
scientists and ingenious amateurs who actually discovered the option of risk--of
scientifically linking the present to the future. It blends biography with history and
science to show how famous thinkers paved the way from superstition to the super computer.
Amazon.com:
With the stock market breaking records almost daily, leaving longtime market analysts
shaking their heads and revising their forecasts, a study of the concept of risk seems
quite timely. Peter Bernstein has written a comprehensive history of man's efforts to
understand risk and probability, beginning with early gamblers in ancient Greece,
continuing through the 17th-century French mathematicians Pascal and Fermat and up to
modern chaos theory. Along the way he demonstrates that understanding risk underlies
everything from game theory to bridge-building to winemaking.
The Wall Street Journal :
In his delightful history of risk, Peter Bernstein traces how humanity has put itself less
and less at the mercy of the laws of chance.
From Booklist , 09/15/96:
Bernstein's lively history chronicles a profound transformation in attitudes about the
future. How one's fate changed from depending less on capricious outcomes and more on
predictable ones forms the backbone of the narrative. His central characters are
mathematicians who began pondering the statistics of gambling, or gamblers pondering the
risks of gambling: about one sixteenth-century polymath, Girolamo Cardano, Bernstein
writes that his "credentials as a gambling addict alone would justify his appearance
in the history of risk," and that comment is typical of Bernstein's engaging
presentation. Amid his recounting of the insights into probability from Pascal to Keynes,
he touches on an array of modern fields in which risk analysis is crucial--insurance,
commodities futures, stock markets, and that old standard, gambling. This cornucopia of
biographical sketches, mathematical examples, and reflections on the nature of human
expectations about the future faces little risk of idling in libraries; patrons of the
business section might be keenest to read it.
Copyright© 1996, American Library Association. All rights reserved
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