On reading Bernoulli’s Ars conjectandi 1713

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Anthony Edwards, Gonville and Caius
• Monday 02 February 2015, 19:15-21:30
• Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Peter Watson.

James Bernoulli’s posthumous book is famous among statisticians for the binomial distribution in Part I, the Bernoulli numbers in Part II and the limit theorem in Part IV, but it contains much else of interest besides. It is full of Pascal triangles, and Bernoulli’s treatment of the polynomials for the sums of the powers of the integers leads to the discovery that the Bernoulli numbers had already been published by Johann Faulhaber in 1631. We can now see how Bernoulli derived the polynomials; the simple algorithm reveals an error in his table of the coefficients. An alternative and elegant procedure involves the inversion of Pascal matrices of binomial coefficients.

This talk is part of the Cambridge Statistics Discussion Group (CSDG) series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All CMS events
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• BHRU Annual Lecture 2015
• BHRU Annual Lecture 2016
• CMS Events
• Cambridge Statistics Discussion Group (CSDG)
• Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit Special Seminars
• DPMMS Lists
• DPMMS info aggregator
• DPMMS lists
• Department of Public Health and Primary Care
• Hanchen DaDaDash
• Interested Talks
• PublicHealth@Cambridge
• School of Physical Sciences
• Statistical Laboratory info aggregator
• Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge
• bld31

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.