"Does God play dice with the universe?"

Probability has been used for millennia, but not studied until the 16th century. It's funny that it took until Pascal and Fermat looked at probability of future events that they could find a solution for their game problem. It's really cool to see the quick development of probability and statistical theory as people noticed patterns and started applying them. I had no idea, but even the Romans and Greeks didn't look at probabilities at all!

Overall, I see a general swing toward belief in order during the Enlightenment, and in the last century a swing back to belief in chaos and unpredictability of systems. I find it interesting that these belief swings occurred across many fields of study, not just mathematics.

The speaker went on to discuss sensitive dependence on initial conditions. He discussed the Lorenz attractor, which hearkened back to when I took calculus 3 and differential equations. That was when I was most interested in mathematics for mathematics' sake. This talk made me interested in maybe taking Math 534.

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