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Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801 - 1877) was a mathematician, philosopher, economist and educator (Feller 1961; Etudes 1978). Here, I discuss his contribution of 1843 reprinted in 1984 (Paris, Libraire J. Vrin) as vol. 1 of his Oeuvres Complètes complete with an Introduction and Commentary by B. Bru. The Preface begins by an explanation: Cournot wished to make assessable his subject to those unacquainted with the higher chapters of mathematics. In
123 he even repeated the formulation of the Pythagorean proposition (excluded in the translation) and in
69 he says that he adduced a table (Kramp´s table) of a certain function (of the exponential function of a negative square) but he did not provide its analytical expression.

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Sheynin, Oscar
Oscar Sheynin. Honorary Fellow, Royal Statistical Society. Born and educated in Moscow (Geodetic Inst., Univ., Mech.Math. Faculty). Docent of Plekhanov Inst. For more than 30 years now, I have been studying the history of probability, statistics, and error theory and working in this field as a free-lance researcher.

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