The intellectual history of humanity's attempt to understand risk — from ancient Greek gambling through Pascal's wager, Bayes' theorem, Gauss's bell curve, Markowitz's portfolio theory, and Black-Scholes. Bernstein shows how probability and risk management transformed investing from gambling into a rational enterprise. The rare book that makes the history of mathematics genuinely thrilling.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.