This is a very interesting and entertaining book. It details the history and story of probabilities and how man was able to finally quantify the odds of something happening over another. It took thousands of years for the math and theory to be understood, and spanned various languages and empires borrowing ideas from one another until all the pieces finally came together. Before man discovered probability theory, all chance was supposed to come from 'the gods,' therefore it wasn't important to try to understand it any other way. When you roll the dice, the gods determined what numbers came up, not math. This is the first book I've ever read dealing with the history and background of a math problem, and it made the math so much more interesting to me. This is not a text book, more of a history book. And that makes it much more entertaining and engaging to regular folks.
Once Blaise Pascal was able to put all the pieces together to calculate the odds of a game of chance, the book dives into the various industries that probability theory was able to positively affect. He shows how the life insurance industry was able to finally calculate how much they should be charging in premiums, how statistics came to being, and finally how the finance industry uses risk management. It is in the finance and investing portion that most of the application is shown in the book (the author is a financial consultant so this is understandable).
All in all, it's both educational and entertaining, and I recommend it to all.
