The Measure of Hope: Lichtenberg on Probability and the Gambler’s Calculations

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg presented his inaugural lecture as professor of mathematics at the University of Göttingen in 1770 on a contested topic of the time: probability theory and its relationship to gamblers’ choices in games of chance. This article considers Lichtenberg’s lecture, in conjunction with his trenchant commentaries on the lottery in letters and aphorisms within the context of the fascination with the lottery prevalent in the late eighteenth century. Lichtenberg reflects on games of chance both as a scientific test case for the mathematics of probability and as a window into the social world and its individual actors. His engagement with the figure of the gambler in the context of mathematical probability and of life experience illuminates both the shifting contours of the discipline of mathematics and emergent conceptions and disciplinary understandings of subjectivity in the late eighteenth century. With attention to linguistic nuance, Lichtenberg probes the epistemic capacity and limitations of these diverse modes of inquiry to explore questions of mathematical models, individual circumstances and subjective judgment, and forms of rationality and irrationality that shape human behavior.