He goes into the story of how Benford’s Law was discovered. Throughout the book, Weaver discusses all sorts of different ideas. Weaver writes about the Gambler’s Ruin and the Gambler’s Fallacy.

This leads to the idea of the expected value. For example, Weaver discusses the Problem of Points where a game is called off in the middle and we have to decide how to fairly distribute the pot. It starts with the history and moves on to famous problems and their solutions. His intent was for people to become enamored of Probability Theory and become mathematicians, or at least, to become people that used Probability in their everyday lives. As I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review, Weaver wanted this book to be read by the layman. Eventually, these applications became more widespread, culminating in our modern treatment of it. Initially, Probability was intended to find solutions to Gambling problems. In contrast to other fields of inquiry, we can trace the birth of Probability to gentlemen such as Cardano, Pascal, Fermat, and others. It starts easily enough, going through the storied history of Probability and discussing the reasons for its founding. Warren Weaver wrote Lady Luck back in the 1960s with the hope that this book would be read by the layman. Weaver's references to distinctively late 50s early 60s phenomenon provide an entertaining look at the thoughts of the time.Īs a famous song goes, Luck be a Lady tonight. Weaver's work, far from being in any sense 'slow,' deals with how we are to take into account this very basic ideas that form the starting point to this particular area of the mathematical sciences. A concept such as 'independent random variable' which a mediocre statistics textbook may quickly skip is a surprisingly philosophically complicated idea, and has troubled academicians, let alone lay people. What is most important about the work is that it provides the reader an extremely entertaining and well written framework for thinking about questions of probability.

Weaver is very careful about presenting his arguments so that they may have maximum intuitive appeal, while at the same time refusing to compromise the mathematical rigor that is necessary to construct any serious theory of rudimentary probability.

Weaver's 'Lady Luck' lies in its sheer readability.

Lady Luck by Warren Weaver