Abstract

Randomness, uncertainty, and lack of regularity had concerned savants for a long time. As early as the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal conceived the arithmetic of chance for gambling. At the height of positional astronomy, mathematicians developed a theory of errors to cope with random deviations in astronomical observations. In the nineteenth century, pioneers of statistics employed probabilistic calculus to define “normal” and “pathological” in the distribution of social characters, while physicists devised the statistical-mechanical interpretation of thermodynamic effects. By the end of the century, a probabilistic worldview—as historians Lorrain Daston, Theodore Porter, and Stephen Stigler.