694 – Useful Classroom Activities
Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi and Its Pedagogical Implications
Ilhan Izmirli
George Mason University
This year marks the 303rd anniversary of Jacob Bernoulli's masterpiece Ars Conjectandi. This book that covered permutations, combinations, sums of powers of positive integers, and the Law of Large Numbers, had significant ramifications in the theory of probability. Many papers have been written on Ars Conjectandi: Beardon (1996), Edwards (1986), Knuth (1993), and Denker (2013), to mention a few. But most of these papers concentrated on Bernoulli's theorem on the sums of powers of positive integers. In fact, in 1913, Markov said "More than two hundred years passed since Bernoulli's death, but he lives and he will live in his theorem." In this paper we will briefly discuss the probabilistic contents of this book and analyze how it pertains to our modern day teaching of probability and statistics.