The study of the former is historically older in, for example, the law of evidence, while the mathematical treatment of dice began with the work of Cardano, Pascal, Fermat and Christiaan Huygens between the 16th and 17th century.
[3] The mathematical methods of probability arose in the investigations first of Gerolamo Cardano in the 1560s (not published until 100 years later), and then in the correspondence Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal (1654) on such questions as the fair division of the stake in an interrupted game of chance.
[6] The pottery of ancient Greece provides evidence to show that the astragali were tossed into a circle drawn on the floor, much like playing marbles.
According to Pausanias,[7] Palamedes invented dice during the Trojan wars, although their true origin is uncertain.
The power of probabilistic methods in dealing with uncertainty was shown by Gauss's determination of the orbit of Ceres from a few observations.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a major success of explanation in terms of probabilities was the statistical mechanics of Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs which explained properties of gases such as temperature in terms of the random motions of large numbers of particles.
Probability and statistics became closely connected through the work on hypothesis testing of R. A. Fisher and Jerzy Neyman, which is now widely applied in biological and psychological experiments and in clinical trials of drugs, as well as in economics and elsewhere.
In the mid-century frequentism was dominant, holding that probability means long-run relative frequency in a large number of trials.
At the end of the century there was some revival of the Bayesian view, according to which the fundamental notion of probability is how well a proposition is supported by the evidence for it.