The theory of probability

In 1956 the AN USSR Publishing House published three volumes of the monograph Mathematics: Its Content, Methods, and Meaning which was elaborated by the Steklov Mathematical Institute RAN. A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, and M. A. Lavrentiev were the members of the editorial board. In order for the mathematical community to have an opportunity to discuss the monograph, 350 copies of it were printed in 1953 as a manuscript.
Kolmogorov's idea was that it would be good to have two books: a first which informally was planned as “Anticourant” (see the introduction to the 3rd Russian edition of R. Courant and H. Robbins, What is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods, Oxford University Press, London, New York, 1996), i.e., a book for everybody who wants in vivid and simple form to get to know the elements of higher mathematics, to test the level of his abilities in mathematics, and, for a young reader, to consider choosing mathematics as his profession, and a second book “intended for more advanced readers including ourselves, mathematicians, who very often are helpless in estimating future trends of their science as a whole.” Finally, three volumes containing 20 chapters showed the best correlation with the first of the variants indicated above. This follows additionally from the introduction which says that “the purpose of the author was to acquaint a wide Soviet circle with the content and methods of separate mathematical disciplines, their material resources, and paths of development.”
In Chapter XI of the second volume of this monograph, the Kolmogorov paper was published, which is reprinted in the present jubilee issue together with the Khinchin referee report and selected correspondence of A. D. Aleksandrov (Editor-in-Chief of the monograph) with A. N. Kolmogorov, which are interesting both for their view on the content of the variant of the paper presented by Kolmogorov and for the philosophical and methodological aspects of probability theory.
A. N. Shiryaev