Thursday, October 25, 2007

P. L. Bernstein: Against The Gods: The Remarkable Story Of Risk

http://www.businessweek.com/1996/43/b349881.htm

"Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it. This is a lively, panoramic book that includes tales of everyone from Omar Khayyam to Florence Nightingale to Daniel Ellsberg. Khayyam, the poet, was also a mathematician. Nightingale, the nurse, once offered to fund a chair in applied statistics at Oxford University. And Ellsberg, the Defense Dept. analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, specialized in the behavioral psychology of risk-taking."
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CHAPTER 4