without actually working with shuffling so much and I have a question uh why did Markov invent Markov chains what a good question where did you find this question I will answer that because it's a nice story um uh so around the turn of the century but actually it lasted quite a long time uh in the Soviet Union a kind of mathematical lysenchoism took over the mathematical Community it was it had a religious overtones it was one of the main themes of it was Free Will and the Russian analysts in the cities to which this was going on were sort of instructed to not work on smooth functions because they didn't have enough free will but that's somehow where the Soviet School of of of of more General functions uh arose you may think this is crazy nobody can tell us what to work on if they break your windows you know beat you up um uh you know fire you from your job and it all happened uh all of a sudden you know this is a problem so there was some crazy people who were espousing this free will this is an interesting book about it um there was a czar of probability and he was called necrosoft like Microsoft but and he declared that the only things that were fit to work on for probabilists were sums of independent random variables because only they had enough Free Will in order to so that the basic laws of probability would hold Markov couldn't stand this story and he invented Markov chains as a political statement markup chains are dependent and he proved the law of large numbers in the central limit theorem for Markov chains and the last line of his paper is thus Free Will is not necessary to do probability so they were invented as a political example not because it's a wonderful Story and there's a there's beautiful article about it by Eugene Sunita and uh Back To Top