People in all walks of life–poker players, politicians, scientists, and investors–constantly make choices and take risks. The modern world would fail to exist without the tools we routinely apply to evaluate and control those risks we take. The great success story begins a thousand years ago with a group of bold thinkers who embarked on a remarkable adventure of intellectual discovery, transforming superstition into the powerful tools of risk control that we use today. These scientific and mathematical pioneers discovered new uses for numbers, determining the extent to which the past can affect the future