Brown Number Theory (BNT) is named for the 19th century German engineer Ernst Brown who was involved in water system design in Berlin.  Brown was fascinated by roulette and determined there must be a mathematical basis for predicting a single occurrence of a certain combination of numbers.  Over a period of many years, Brown painstakingly collected data on the ball drops on 10 roulette wheels.  Brown (1899) noted that there were several "interesting" localized data phenomena but he could never formulate a predictive theory.  He later abandoned the effort as useless after he went bankrupt due to gamboling debts.

Brown and his wife Marie then set about applying the theory to prediction of natural events such as storms and temperatures.  The almanac they published in 1901, based on extrapolations from a few measurements taken from the previous two years, was very successful.  Based on that first success they continued publishing the almanac but never achieved the success of their first edition, possibly due to refinements in the theory that have since been discredited.

Previously, in the late 1840's, Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, had prepared but not published a paper regarding predicting the outcomes of horse races using mathematical techniques. Her experiments in validating these techniques lead to large debts prior to her death from cancer in 1852. 

The next occurrence of a Brown-like number in the literature is a cite of a "ballpark" number by Crapper (1908).  Although much of what Crapper described was Brown, he neither developed nor presented a general theory.

(c) 1982, 2009 Jorge Branche, Jr.