 The St. Petersburg paradox is named after one of the leading scientific journals of the eighteenth century, Commentarii Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae [Papers of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Petersburg], in which Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782) published a paper entitled “Specimen Theoriae Novae de Mensura Sortis” [“Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk”] in 1738. Daniel Bernoulli had learned about the problem from his cousin Nicolaus I (1687–1759), who proposed an early but unnecessarily complex version of the paradox in a letter to Pierre Rémond de Montmort on 9 September 1713 (for this and related letters see J. Bernoulli 1975). Nicolaus asked de Montmort to imagine an example in which an ordinary dice is rolled until a 6 comes up: