Peter L. Bernstein

Against the Gods traces how humanity moved from treating the future as fate to treating it as risk, which required probability, and probability required somebody to think seriously about dice.

Bernstein runs it from Greek merchants through Pascal and Fermat, Bernoulli, Gauss, insurance, and on to modern portfolio theory, and the argument is that the ability to price uncertainty is what separates modern times from everything before.

He worked as a money manager for decades before writing history, which is why the finance is not naive. Capital Ideas covers the academic theory that reshaped Wall Street.