Literal and Liberal Translations of Bertrand’s Box Paradox

In his 1889 book “Calcul des Probabilités”, the French mathematician Joseph Bertrand (1822–1900) introduced a probability paradox that anticipates both the Monty Hall problem and the Three Prisoners problem. Below we first present a literal translation of Bertrand’s text, which unfortunately suffers from being somewhat unclear. We therefore follow it up with a more liberal translation, and end with a…

read more