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"a century ago this week. Mathematician Andrey A. Markov delivered a lecture that day to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg on a computational technique now called the Markov chain. Little noticed in its day, his idea for modeling probability is fundamental to all of present-day science, statistics, and scientific computing. Any attempt to simulate probable events based on vast amounts of data - the weather, a Google search, the behavior of liquids - relies on Markov's idea."

"As Markov chains have become commonplace tools, the story of their origin has largely faded from memory. The story is worth retelling. It features an unusual conjunction of mathematics and literature, as well as a bit of politics and even theology."