Antoine Gombaud, alias Chevalier de Méré, (1607 – 29 December 1684) was a French writer, born in Poitou.
Like many 17th century liberal thinkers, he distrusted both hereditary power and democracy, a stance at odds with his self-bestowed noble title.
Gombaud's most famous essays are L'honnête homme (The Honest Man) and Discours de la vraie honnêteté (Discourse on True Honesty),[1] but he is far better known for his contribution to probability theory.
Suppose two players agree to play a certain number of games, say a best-of-seven series, and are interrupted before they can finish.
He also claimed that his probability calculations showed that mathematics was inconsistent, and argued elsewhere that mathematicians were wrong in thinking that lines are infinitely divisible.