4.1 The main idea, cont
The Monte Carlo method probably got its name from The Symposium "Monte Carlo Method" held in Los Angeles in July, 1949. In a preface to the Proceedings A.S. Householder defines the method with the words:The Monte Carlo method may briefly be described as the device of studying an artificial stochastic model of a physical or mathematical process. The device is certainly not new. Moreover, the theory of stochastic processes has been subject of study for quite some time, and the novelty in the Monte Carlo method does not lie here. The novelty lies rather in the suggestion that where an equation arising in nonprobabilistic context demands a numerical solution not easily obtainable by standard numerical methods, there may exist a stochastic process with distributions or parameters which satisfy the equation, and it may actually be more efficient to construct such a process and compute the statistics than to attempt to use those standard methods."