The Doctrine of Chances: Probabilistic Aspects of Gambling

Three centuries ago Montmort and De Moivre published two of the first books on probability theory, then called the doctrine of chances, emphasizing its most important application at that time, games of chance. This volume, on the probabilistic aspects of gambling, is a modern version of those classics. While covering the classical material such as house advantage and gambler's ruin, it also takes up such 20th-century topics as martingales, Markov chains, game theory, bold play, and optimal proportional play.

Theory of Zipf's Law and Beyond

Zipf's law is one of the few quantitative reproducible regularities found in economics. It states that, for most countries, the size distributions of cities and of firms are power laws with a specific exponent: the number of cities and of firms with sizes greater than S is inversely proportional to S. Zipf's law also holds in many other scientific fields.