The difficult birth of stochastics: Jacob Bernoulli's \textit{Ars conjectandi} (1713) (Q2251423)

This paper deals with the belated (and troublesome) publication of Jakob Bernoulli's \textit{Ars conjectandi} in 1713, eight years after its author's death. Beyond telling the history and the reasons of this delay, the paper underlines that in the book the word `probability' has not yet got its current meaning, but ``it refers to the manner in which the model itself can be approved, i.e. shown to yield a fair solution, to its verifiction by observed reality'' (p.~280), and this approach is the background of one of the main novelties in the book: the `law of large numbers'. In this view the issue about objective and subjective philosophies of probability had already its setting at the very beginning of the theory.