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How a Math Feud in Russia Shaped the Digital World
On the birth of the Markov Chain
What do nuclear bombs, Google search, and Solitaire have in common?
They originate from a bitter feud between two Russian mathematicians more than 100 years ago. Andrey Markov and Pavel Nekrasov had a clash that wasn’t just academic — it was ideological and even political.
If you’re a bit into mathematics, you already can guess who won at the end: Markov. Their clash led to one of the most powerful tools in modern science: the Markov chain.
The law of large numbers
If you think back to your school days and probability class, there is one fundamental assumption: if you repeat events that are independent (that’s important), the average outcome converges to the expected value. An example is flipping a coin. If it is a so called fair coin, it will fall 50 % of the time on heads and 50 % on tails.
The law at work here is the law of large numbers, proven by Bernoulli in 1713.
In 1905 Russia was torn between Tsarists and socialists and exactly this principle became a battleground.
Pavel Nekrasov (a Tsarist and very religious) argued that statistical convergence in social data, like marriage or crime rates, proved that…
