Markov was an atheist. In 1912 he protested Leo Tolstoy's excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church by requesting his own excommunication. The Church complied with his request. [Wikipedia.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Markov)

I always assumed a Markov chain was some kind of Siberian drinking game. Hence the interest in the running the chain to its stationary distribution.

Odd that this was down-voted. It's a (bad) joke. Allow me to explain:

Calculating the stationary distribution is one of the main things people do with Markov chains. That's all that PageRank is -- the stationary distribution of the Markov chain constructed from the network of links on the web.

{The odds are pretty high that this will get downvoted, on account of the lack of vodka.}

Markovs is a natural law, proven, is it not? Well then, it will be found in any system.

I get the Markov chain part, I don't get the Siberian drinking game part....

Being a true Markov, his history is irrelevant!

Easily the best joke in this discussion.

the reason why not many people know who Markov is is that sometimes he is hidden. And a hidden markov can be quite elusive.

I recommend first checking for him in Monaco. Monte Carlo, Monaco, to be precise...

Just be sure to always bet on black, 2 ..

Just ask Viterbi, Viterbi always knows where the hidden Markov is.

> A “Monopoly” board has 40 possible “states”

Ah, just like chess has 64 possible states. Except that chess has on the order 10^47 states.

They needed to use "Chutes and Ladders," which really does have a handful of states.

The [position of a player on a Monopoly board] has 40 possible states.

But the transition between states in Monopoly depends not only on dice, but also upon the configuration of Chance and Community Chest cards, which has a much larger state space. Besides this, if you roll doubles three times, you go to Jail, which increases the state space more. For more:

http://www.tkcs-collins.com/truman/monopoly/monopoly.shtml

Good point, you're right.

Russia used Julian calendar up to 1918. If that was a date marked in the original calendar, it wasn't 100 years ago "this week".

This is also why the October Revolution happened in November, depending on what calendar you use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_revolution

Slightly off-topic, but Brian Hayes (mentioned several times in the article) has a very good blog here: http://bit-player.org/

Even today wikipedia mentions nothing of interdependence on probability...