Lessons from the famous 17th‐century paradox of the Chevalier de Méré

Abstract

We take advantage of a combinatorial misconception and the famous paradox of the Chevalier de Méré to present the multiplication rule for independent events; the principle of inclusion and exclusion in the presence of disjoint events; the median of a discrete‐type random variable, and a confidence interval for a large sample. Moreover, we pay tribute to our original bibliographic sources by providing two computational tools to facilitate the students' insights on these topics.