Pierre-Simon Laplace
description: French mathematician and astronomer (1749-1827)
75 results
Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI
by Carissa Véliz · 21 Apr 2026 · 503pp · 129,255 words
. It suggests that nothing is random, and everything is knowable, at least in principle. It paved the way for determinism. The French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, whom we will meet again soon, starts his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities by stating, “All events, even those which on account of their insignificance do
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.[26] He faced no jury, of any number, making him one of the many children of the Revolution who was devoured by it. The Opportunist Pierre-Simon Laplace had a taste for power. He was no Isaac Newton, a contemporary scientist who was a recluse obsessed with truth. Laplace’s genius wasn’t
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, data analysts, and engineers. Algorithms are the new tea leaves, animal entrails, and stars through which we hope to catch a glimpse of the future. Pierre-Simon Laplace, our opportunist from the previous chapter, had a dream, often referred to as Laplace’s demon. It occurred to him that, with enough data and
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–85. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to know more about the stars and why they matter. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27 Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 65, 276. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28 Ibid., 274. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29 Vincent, Beyond Measure, 218–19. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30 Trotta
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Science 1, no. 1 (2009): 107–43. Gigerenzer, Gerd, and David J. Murray. Cognition as Intuitive Statistics. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1987. Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749–1827: A Life in Exact Science. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Glasziou, Paul, and Iain Chalmers. “Is 85% of Health Research Really
God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History
by Stephen Hawking · 28 Mar 2007
Jordan Bell. Leonhard Euler’s The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg and Proof that Every Integer is A Sum of Four Squares courtesy of Dover Publications. Pierre Simon Laplace’s A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, introductory note by E.T. Bell, courtesy of Dover Publications. Selection from Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier’s The Analytical
From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time
by Sean M. Carroll · 15 Jan 2010 · 634pp · 185,116 words
than the speed of light, rendering the body “black.” Indeed, the idea was occasionally contemplated, including by British geologist John Michell in 1783 and by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796.73 At the time, it wasn’t clear whether the idea quite made sense, as nobody knew whether light was even affected by
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: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. —Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler Pierre-Simon Laplace was a social climber at a time when social climbing was a risky endeavor.102 When the French Revolution broke out, Laplace had established himself
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of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.” To which Laplace answered stubbornly, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”103 Figure 31: Pierre-Simon Laplace, mathematician, physicist, swerving politician, and unswerving determinist. One of the central tenets of Laplace’s philosophy was determinism. It was Laplace who truly appreciated the
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: the “Principle of Indifference.” It was championed in the context of probability theory, long before statistical mechanics even came on the scene, by our friend Pierre-Simon Laplace. He was a die-hard determinist, but understood as well as anyone that we usually don’t have access to all possible facts, and wanted
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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Novikov, I. D. The River of Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. O’Connor, J. J., and Robertson, E. F. “Pierre-Simon Laplace.” MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive (1999). http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/ Laplace.html. Olum, K. D. “The Doomsday Argument and
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Kasner, Edward Kelvin, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin scale Kepler, Johannes Kerr, Roy kinetic energy kinetic theory Kleban, Matthew Kolmogorov complexity Landauer, Rolf Lao Tzu Laplace, Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Demon Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Lavoisier, Antoine Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory laws of nature laws of physics. See also specific forces and bouncing-universe
The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy
by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne · 16 May 2011 · 561pp · 120,899 words
, Maurice P. (1967) The Society of Arcueil; A View of French Science at the Time of Napoleon I. Harvard University Press. Dale, Andrew I. (1995) Pierre-Simon Laplace: Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Trans. and notes by Dale. Springer-Verlag. ———. (1999) A History of Inverse Probability from Thomas Bayes to Karl Pearson. 2d ed
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Regime. And Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years. Princeton University Press. Gillispie, CC, with Robert Fox and Ivor Grattan-Guinness. (1997) Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749–1827: A Life in Exact Science. Princeton University Press. Greenberg, John. (1986) Mathematical physics in eighteenth-century France. Isis (77) 59–78. Grimaux, Édouard
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths · 4 Apr 2016 · 523pp · 143,139 words
—how to distill all the various possible hypotheses into a single specific expectation—would be discovered only a few years later, by the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace’s Law Laplace was born in Normandy in 1749, and his father sent him to a Catholic school with the intent that he join
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is 2⁄π times the needle’s length divided by the length of the gap. For Buffon, deriving this formula was enough. But in 1812, Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the heroes of chapter 6, pointed out that this result has another implication: one could estimate the value of π simply by dropping
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, we then divide by the sum of these likelihoods. Laplace was born in Normandy: For more details on Laplace’s life and work, see Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace. distilled down to a single estimate: Laplace’s Law is derived by working through the calculation suggested by Bayes—the tricky part is the sum
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. Gilboa, Itzhak, and Eitan Zemel. “Nash and Correlated Equilibria: Some Complexity Considerations.” Games and Economic Behavior 1, no. 1 (1989): 80–93. Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749–1827: A Life in Exact Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Gilmore, Paul C., and Ralph E. Gomory. “A Linear Programming Approach to
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knapsack problem Knuth, Donald Koomen, Pete Ladder tournaments Lagrange, Joseph-Louis Lagrangian Relaxation Lai, Tze Leung lancet liver fluke Lange, Rebecca language Lao Tzu Laplace, Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Law Lasso latency lateness, minimizing maximum laundry law enforcement Lawler, Eugene “Gene” “Lawn Tennis Tournaments” (Dodgson) Law of Gross Tonnage Lawrence, Peter A. Lawrence
What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge
by Marcus Du Sautoy · 18 May 2016
produced equations for non-viscous fluids. At the beginning of the nineteenth century French mathematician Joseph Fourier found equations to describe heat flow. Fellow compatriots Pierre-Simon Laplace and Siméon-Denis Poisson took Newton’s equations to produce more generalized equations for gravitation, which were then seen to control other phenomena like hydrodynamics
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controlled by mathematical equations. Scientists believed they had indeed discovered the Theory of Everything. In his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities published in 1812, the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace summed up most scientists’ belief in the extraordinary power of mathematics to tell you everything about the physical universe. We may regard the present state
Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
by Tom Chivers · 6 May 2024 · 283pp · 102,484 words
after Simpson’s 1755 article. It appears to have sunk almost without trace—it was published after Bayes’s death, but was apparently unknown to Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French mathematician who independently arrived at similar conclusions in 1774. Stigler argues that Bayes himself didn’t think all that much of it—he
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make inferences—to make statements about what is likely in the world. In the years after Bayes’s death, the great French mathematician and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace independently arrived at the same conclusions as Bayes, and gave a rather more detailed account of it. Richard Price visited Paris in 1781 and discussed
The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI
by Edward Dolnick · 8 Feb 2011 · 439pp · 104,154 words
built a universe that had no place within it for God. The crowning glory of eighteenth-century astronomy was the proof, by the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace, that although the planets did wobble a bit as they circled the sun, those wobbles stayed within a narrow, predictable range. Since the wobbles did
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig · 14 Jul 2019 · 2,466pp · 668,761 words
probability mass of the model for never-seen n-grams, to reduce the variance of the model. The simplest type of smoothing was suggested by Pierre-Simon Laplace in the 18th century to estimate the probability of rare events, such as the sun failing to rise tomorrow. Laplace’s (incorrect) theory of the
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Prince, 1993; Kager, 1999) posited that language works by finding the most probable candidate that optimally satisfies competing constraints. Add-one smoothing, first suggested by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1816), was formalized by Jeffreys (1948). Other smoothing techniques include interpolation smoothing (Jelinek and Mercer, 1980), Witten–Bell smoothing (1991), Good–Turing smoothing (Church and
Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
by Brian Klaas · 23 Jan 2024 · 250pp · 96,870 words
a Birmingham jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” * * * In 1814, a French polymath named Pierre-Simon Laplace was grappling with the enduring mysteries of such an intertwined existence. Why are we so bad at predicting our futures? Why do events so often
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that conundrum, they unleashed rapid advancements in the nascent field of probability, bolstered by titans such as Gerolamo Cardano, the Chevalier de Méré, Jacob Bernoulli, Pierre-Simon Laplace (of Laplace’s demon), and Thomas Bayes (who developed what we now call Bayesian inference or Bayesian statistics). As the mathematical tools grew, a greater
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July 2022. “garment of destiny”: Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 16 April 1963. Laplace’s demon: R. Hahan and R. Hahn, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1749–1827: A Determined Scientist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). “before its eyes”: David P. Feldman, “Newton, Laplace, and Determinism,” in Chaos and Fractals
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick · 1 Mar 2011 · 855pp · 178,507 words
Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay · 5 Mar 2020 · 807pp · 154,435 words
Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts · 28 Mar 2011 · 327pp · 103,336 words
The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley · 395pp · 116,675 words
Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil · 23 Sep 2019
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver · 31 Aug 2012 · 829pp · 186,976 words
The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone · 3 Jun 2019 · 283pp · 81,376 words
Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
by Steven Strogatz · 31 Mar 2019 · 407pp · 116,726 words
Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell · 31 Mar 2009 · 524pp · 120,182 words
The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee · 16 May 2016 · 824pp · 218,333 words
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner · 14 Sep 2015 · 317pp · 100,414 words
Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili · 22 Oct 2012 · 208pp · 70,860 words
More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin · 1 Jan 2006 · 348pp · 83,490 words
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
by Kathryn Schulz · 7 Jun 2010 · 486pp · 148,485 words
The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission
by Jim Bell · 24 Feb 2015 · 310pp · 89,653 words
Catching Stardust: Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System
by Natalie Starkey · 8 Mar 2018 · 284pp · 89,477 words
A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation
by Richard Bookstaber · 5 Apr 2007 · 289pp · 113,211 words
Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It)
by William Poundstone · 5 Feb 2008
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell · 7 Oct 2019 · 416pp · 112,268 words
The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent · 22 May 2017 · 789pp · 207,744 words
Think Complexity
by Allen B. Downey · 23 Feb 2012 · 247pp · 43,430 words
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky · 11 Mar 2015 · 1,737pp · 491,616 words
Engineering Security
by Peter Gutmann
The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling
by Adam Kucharski · 23 Feb 2016 · 360pp · 85,321 words
Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System
by Ray Jayawardhana · 3 Feb 2011 · 257pp · 66,480 words
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie · 1 Mar 2018
Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith · 26 Jun 2019 · 370pp · 107,983 words
The Simulation Hypothesis
by Rizwan Virk · 31 Mar 2019 · 315pp · 89,861 words
The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return
by Mihir Desai · 22 May 2017 · 239pp · 69,496 words
To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science
by Steven Weinberg · 17 Feb 2015 · 532pp · 133,143 words
Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis · 26 Mar 2019
Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson · 28 Feb 2011 · 790pp · 150,875 words
Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
by Christopher Steiner · 29 Aug 2012 · 317pp · 84,400 words
Alex's Adventures in Numberland
by Alex Bellos · 3 Apr 2011 · 437pp · 132,041 words
The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James E. Lovelock · 1 Jan 2009 · 239pp · 68,598 words
The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction
by Richard Bookstaber · 1 May 2017 · 293pp · 88,490 words
The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age
by Paul J. Nahin · 27 Oct 2012 · 229pp · 67,599 words
Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street
by Aaron Brown and Eric Kim · 10 Oct 2011 · 483pp · 141,836 words
Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki · 15 Mar 2015 · 343pp · 102,846 words
AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together
by Nick Polson and James Scott · 14 May 2018 · 301pp · 85,126 words
Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang · 10 Sep 2018 · 745pp · 207,187 words
Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World's Richest Man
by Jonathan Conlin · 3 Jan 2019 · 604pp · 165,488 words
Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger · 29 Jul 2013 · 528pp · 146,459 words
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
by David Eagleman · 29 May 2011 · 383pp · 92,837 words
Information: A Very Short Introduction
by Luciano Floridi · 25 Feb 2010 · 137pp · 36,231 words
Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann · 17 Jun 2019
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
by Charles Seife · 31 Aug 2000 · 233pp · 62,563 words
Interplanetary Robots
by Rod Pyle
The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World
by Sarah Stewart Johnson · 6 Jul 2020 · 400pp · 99,489 words
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker · 14 Oct 2021 · 533pp · 125,495 words
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
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This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman · 14 Feb 2012 · 416pp · 106,582 words
The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood
by Dhun Sethna · 6 Jun 2022 · 325pp · 101,669 words
Symmetry and the Monster
by Ronan, Mark · 14 Sep 2006 · 212pp · 65,900 words
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell · 11 May 2015 · 409pp · 105,551 words
The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
by James Rickards · 15 Nov 2016 · 354pp · 105,322 words
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton · 19 Feb 2016 · 903pp · 235,753 words
Know Thyself
by Stephen M Fleming · 27 Apr 2021
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway · 30 Jun 2014 · 105pp · 18,832 words
The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton · 1 May 2019 · 319pp · 100,984 words
Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
by Rebecca Boyle · 16 Jan 2024 · 354pp · 109,574 words
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
by David Deutsch · 30 Jun 2011 · 551pp · 174,280 words
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall · 19 Mar 2019 · 393pp · 115,217 words
The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
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The Man Who Invented the Computer
by Jane Smiley · 18 Oct 2010 · 253pp · 80,074 words