Quantitative Literacy Through Games and Gambling

This book was developed to address a need. Quantitative Literacy courses have been established in the mathematics curriculum for decades now. The students in these courses typically dislike and fear mathematics, and the result is often a class populated by many students that are unmotivated and uninterested in the material.

This book is a text for such a course; however, it is focused on a single idea that most students seem to already have some intrinsic interest in and is written at an accessible level. It covers the basic ideas of discrete probability and shows how these ideas can be applied to familiar games (roulette, poker, blackjack, etc.) The gambling material is interweaved through the book, introduced as soon as the necessary mathematics has been developed. Throughout, mathematical formalism and symbolism have been avoided, and numerous examples are provided.

The book starts with a simple definition of probability, goes through some basic