From its shady beginnings devising gambling strategies and counting corpses in medieval London, probability theory and statistical inference now emerge as better foundations for scientific models, especially those of the process of thinking and as essential ingredients of theoretical mathematics, even the foundations of mathematics itself.

        ---David Mumford

The dawning of the age of stochasticity, Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Classe di Scienze Fisiche, Matematiche e Naturali, Rendiconti Lincei, Serie IX, Matematica e Applicazioni, volume XI, 2000, special issue: Mathematics Towards the Third Millennium (Papers from the International Conference held in Rome, May 27--29, 1999), p. 107. This is quoted from the beginning of Mumford's article, which offers a fascinating and refreshing view on thinking as Bayesian inference, and the use of probability spaces in image processing.

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