"Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bacheliers model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero."
William Poundstone is an American author, columnist, and skeptic. He has written a number of books including the Big Secrets series and a biography of Carl Sagan.
"The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since."
"By the mid-1930s, Moe Annenburg was AT&Ts fifth largest customer."
"At a bare minimum, understanding entails being able to detect an internal contradiction: a paradox."
"Are there any mythical beasts which arent simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like dont speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish."
"The best paradoxes raise questions about what kinds of contradictions can occur—what species of impossibilities are possible."
"Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are."