Markov chains began with a poem: how Pushkin's Eugene Onegin inspired the 1906 theory
alexbilz · x · 2026-10-01
- Markov chains trace back to a poem. In 1906, A. A. Markov set out to analyze letter sequences in Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin and developed his theory of "trials connected in a chain" — random processes where each event depends on the previous one.
- His key result: the law of large numbers still holds without independence, breaking reliance on that assumption and laying the foundation for a mathematical tool that underpins modern sequence modeling, including LLMs.
- The post links a free Internet Archive copy of the English translation of Eugene Onegin — the very work that spawned the theory of stochastic processes.
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