 The Monty Hall problem is mathematically closely related to the earlier Three Prisoners problem and to the much older Bertrand's box paradox.Steve Selvin wrote a letter to the "American Statistician" in 1975 describing a problem based on the game show "Let's Make a Deal", , dubbing it the "Monty Hall problem" in a subsequent letter .The problem is mathematically equivalent to the Three Prisoners problem described in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in "Scientific American" in 1959 (Gardner 1959a) and the Three Shells Problem described in Gardner's book "Aha Gotcha" .