I’m working on my book about the history of probability and statistics and sharing a few interesting snippets from it. For frequent updates, follow me on X.
Lewis Carroll published Through the Looking Glass in 1871, a story in which Alice steps through a mirror and enters a world where ordinary rules no longer hold. Chess pieces speak, time moves in unexpected directions, and meaning shifts with each encounter. Carroll’s playful inversions reflect a broader intellectual curiosity of the period: how structure, logic, and rule systems shape the worlds we inhabit.
George Boole published The Laws of Thought in 1854 and extended the earlier work of Augustus De Morgan, who had begun to formalize logic in Formal Logic in 1847. De Morgan introduced ideas such as the universe of discourse, and Boole built on this foundation by turning logic into algebra. His symbolic treatment of reasoning created the framework that later developments in probability and statistics would rely on.
John Venn extended Boole’s program in 1881 with Symbolic Logic. Venn introduced a visual method for representing logical relations using overlapping circles. The example shown here is a Venn diagram for the uppercase glyphs shared by the Greek alphabet in the upper left circle, the Latin alphabet in the upper right circle, and the Russian Cyrillic alphabet in the bottom circle. The intersections reveal which letters appear in more than one writing system and which are unique. This way of making relationships visible turned abstract logical structure into something intuitive and concrete, and it soon became a popular tool in probability and set theory.
More updates soon as the manuscript continues to take shape. All images are in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.