Decision theory is a branch of applied probability theory and analytic philosophy concerned with the theory of making decisions based on assigning probabilities to various factors and assigning numerical consequences to the outcome.
The mythological judgement of Paris required selecting from three incomparable alternatives (the goddesses shown).
Military planners often conduct extensive simulations to help predict the decision-making of relevant actors.
The gambler's fallacy: even when the roulette ball repeatedly lands on red, it is no more likely to land on black the next time.
Statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.
Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi was the first work that dealt with probability theory as currently understood.
Carl Friedrich Gauss made major contributions to probabilistic methods leading to statistics.
Karl Pearson, a founder of mathematical statistics
