Preface and Acknowledgments
All things are ready, if our mind be so.
William Shakespeare
For as long as humans have walked the earth, we have been trying to predict things. The Druids built rock alignments like Stonehenge to predict the change of seasons. The Babylonians predicted weather from cloud patterns while the Greeks divined the future by studying the flight patterns of birds.
Predictive science was born in 1687 when Sir Isaac Newton penned Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. This treatise established concepts of modeling and put forward the notion that mathematical equations could be used to predict how systems evolve. Shortly thereafter, enterprising companies like Lloyds began using this new science to risk rate sea voyages ...
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