Joseph Mazur is the author of
What's Luck Got to Do With It?: The History, Mathematics, and Psychology of the Gambler's Illusion and professor emeritus of mathematics at Marlboro College.
For the
Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of books on gambling.
One title on the list:
Roll the Bones
by David G. Schwartz
With "Roll the Bones," David Schwartz, the director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, produced more than just a history of gambling. It is an account of how gambling has affected society ever since our primordial ancestors had to decide whether it was safe to leave the cave when the gambling edge lay with the hungry tigers lurking outside. Gauging risk was a survival tool. The book is a bountiful guide to the origins of dice, playing cards, lotteries and other gambling pastimes. It's filled as well with colorful vignettes of the famous at their gaming—among them Voltaire, outsmarting an 18th-century lottery and winning nine million francs, and Dostoevsky at the German resort in Baden-Baden, going broke at the casino.
Read about
the other books on Mazur's list.
Learn
more about Joseph Mazur's What's Luck Got to Do With It?.
--Marshal Zeringue
Joseph Mazur is the author of What's Luck Got to Do With It?: The History, Mathematics, and Psychology of the Gambler's Illusion and professor emeritus of mathematics at Marlboro College.