>[!citation] >Gardner, M. (1959, October 1). Mathematical games: Problems involving questions of probability and ambiguity. _Scientific American_. **201** (4): 174–182. https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fscientificamerican1059-174 >[!abstract] >Charles Sanders Peirce once observed that in no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory. History bears this out. Leibniz thought it just as easy to throw 12 with a pair of dice as to throw 11. Jean Ie Rond d’Alembert, the great 18th-century French mathematician, could not see that the results of tossing a coin three times are the same as tossing three coins at once, and he believed (as many amateur gamblers persist in believing) that after a long run of heads, a tail is more likely. > >Today probability theory provides clear, unequivocal answers to simple questions of this sort but only when the experimental procedure involved is precisely defined. A failure to do this is a common source of confusion in many recreational problems dealing with chance.