This paper discusses some of the founding work in the field of probabalistic mathematics, that of Jakob Bernoulli, the seventeenth-century Swiss scientist. By discussing similarities between Bernoulli's formulation of the mathematics to evaluate the probability of any given event and the forensic (or courtroom) rhetorics which Bernoulli had studied in school, this paper suggests that the foundations of probabilistic mathematics might well be rooted in part in forensic rhetoric.

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