The Dawning of the Age of Stochasticity

Mumford, David

Atti della Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. Rendiconti Lincei. Matematica e applicazioni, Série 9, Tome 11 (2000), pp. 107-125

Résumé

For over two millennia, Aristotle's logic has ruled over the thinking of western intellectuals. All precise theories, all scientific models, even models of the process of thinking itself, have in principle conformed to the straight-jacket of logic. But from its shady beginnings devising gambling strategies and counting corpses in medieval London, probability theory and statistical inference now emerge as better foundations for scientific models, especially those of the process of thinking and as essential ingredients of theoretical mathematics, even the foundations of mathematics itself. We propose that this see change in our perspective will affect virtually all of mathematics in the next century.