The Man Who Invented Modern Probability
> <i>Kolmogorov armed a group of researchers with electromechanical calculators and charged them with the task of calculating the rhythmical structures of Russian poetry</i><p>And this is what "big data" and NLP were like before computers :).<p>One can only imagine what he could have done with a modern computer. (Which is particular hard to imagine because he's responsible for advances which ultimately led to these same modern computers...)<p>Also, as an aside, I'm very impressed by the quality of nautil.us articles. I've come a across a few randomly, and they've been uniformly high in quality, interesting and insightful.<p>Moreover, unlike much popular science/math reporting, the articles are not ridden with obvious errors and yet are easily followed by somebody not in the field. An impressive combination. (Not surprising for this particular article, I suppose: it was written by a professor teaching the history of mathematics at MIT.)