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Jacob Bernoulli and the Mathematics of Tennis

Jacob Bernoulli and the Mathematics of Tennis Jacob Bernoulli’s Lettre à un Amy sur les Parties du Jeu de Paume employs the sorts of mathematical techniques that had been applied to games of chance by Pascal and Huygens to a game, now called Court Tennis or Royal Tennis, the outcomes of which depended, as he thought, not on chance but on athletic skill. He assumed that the players’ relative strengths could be determined a posteriori or by observation. Bernoulli’s work shows an alternate route by which mathematics was applied to the real world in the seventeenth century, one which did not involve Platonic conceptions of the role of mathematics, but rather the techniques of commercial arithmetic and, in particular, of algebra. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Nuncius (successor of "Annali") Brill

Jacob Bernoulli and the Mathematics of Tennis

Sylla, Edith Dudley
Nuncius (successor of "Annali") , Volume 28 (1): 142 – Jan 1, 2013
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References (1)

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
Subject
Articles
ISSN
0394-7394
eISSN
1825-3911
DOI
10.1163/18253911-02801008
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Jacob Bernoulli’s Lettre à un Amy sur les Parties du Jeu de Paume employs the sorts of mathematical techniques that had been applied to games of chance by Pascal and Huygens to a game, now called Court Tennis or Royal Tennis, the outcomes of which depended, as he thought, not on chance but on athletic skill. He assumed that the players’ relative strengths could be determined a posteriori or by observation. Bernoulli’s work shows an alternate route by which mathematics was applied to the real world in the seventeenth century, one which did not involve Platonic conceptions of the role of mathematics, but rather the techniques of commercial arithmetic and, in particular, of algebra.

Journal

Nuncius (successor of "Annali") – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2013

Keywords: concrete mathematics; art of conjecturing; games of skill

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