> 1. I have been delighted to have had the thoughts conformed to those of M. Pascal, for I admire infinitely his genius and I believe him very capable of coming to the end of all that which he will undertake. The friendship that he offers me is so dear to me and so considerable that I must have no difficulty in making some use of it in the publishing of my Treatises.
> Our blows always continue and I am as glad as you in the admiration that our thoughts are arranged so exactly that it seems that they have taken one same route and make one same path
It makes me wonder if future generations will look back on correspondences between guys like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
https://probabilityandfinance.com/pulskamp/Pascal/Sources/pa...
https://mathoverflow.net/users/9062/bill-thurston
note that he has been deceased for nearly 15 years now.
https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircl...
There are many others for Grothendieck though.
Another example is how Godel wrote a letter to Von Neumann towards the end of his life. This letter contained, among other things, the (now very funny) question of whether a certain NP complete problem may be solvable in quadratic time.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/15455-s17/hartmanis-on-gode...
Practically though, modern correspondence is often through a disjoint set of technologies, that (importantly) someone cleaning up the estate of a deceased person does not necessarily have access to. So it seems unlikely we'll get this kind of insight going forward (with notable exceptions, for example the Epstein emails).
We kinda had that, on Usenet, before spammers flooded it to death.
Imagine Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat teaming together to solve your problem.
The latter book has a Wikipedia page with some more info - was surprised to see Hacking not mentioned here since the featured article is partly based on his work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_Chance
it is funny how probability has always been way behind other maths. i got to use the Birthday problem at work, once, which made the math undergrad totally worth it
fortunately my Polymarket and Kalshi wagers are protected by AES et al
[1] Athough Gauss apparently credited it to Laplace.
Gauss worked out some sort of probability distribution too.
But that's all in the past. Probability is absolutely established in math academia today, Fields medals and all. And despite its applied nature it's pervasive even in pure math.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Montagu,_4th_Earl_of_Sand...
There's a coffee-table book in there somewhere.