How to Gamble if You Must: Inequalities for Stochastic Processes.

Original cloth. Ex-library: white ink number on spine and small label on front cover with clear piece of tape covering them. Ink stamp on flyleaf, half-title and title page. Pouch and barcode on rear pastedown. Else Very Good+, without dust jacket. 'While still in Chicago, Lester met Jimmie Savage (then on the mathematics faculty there) and surprised him by showing that bold play is not uniquely optimal in classical Red & Black (roulette). Jimmie was impressed and invited Lester to join him in trying to better understand the probabilistic structure of gambling situations. This encounter developed into a collaboration generating several key papers and culminating (in 1965) in the ground-breaking monograph How to Gamble if You Must (Inequalities for Stochastic Processes) which presented a coherent mathematical theory of gambling processes and optimal behavior in gambling situations, pointing out their relevance to traditional approaches to probability. In consultation with Bruno de Finetti and under his influence, Dubins and Savage presented their theory in the finitely additive framework in order to bypass measurability technicalities inherent in maximizing an uncountable set of functions in searching for optimal strategies. Lester paid tribute to Jimmie Savage – to his remarkable intellect and scholarship, and to their mutual friendship – in a beautifully phrased preface to the Dover edition of the book which appeared in 1976, five years after Jimmie's untimely death at the age of 54' (David Gilat, Ted Hill, & Bill Sudderth, 'Obituary for Lester Eli Dubins, 1920-2010'). Savage was 'one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius' (Milton & Rose Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs, 1998, p. 146).