The article addresses the necessity of increasing the role of mathematics in the psychological intervention in problem gambling, including cognitive therapies. It also calls for interdisciplinary research with the direct contribution of mathematics. The current contributions and limitations of the role of mathematics are analysed with an eye toward the professional profiles of the researchers. An enhanced collaboration between these two disciplines is suggested and predicted.

Slot machines have gained high popularity despite a specific element that could limit their appeal: non-transparency with respect to mathematical parameters. The PAR sheets, which expose the parameters of the design of slot machines and probabilities associated with the winning combinations, are kept secret by game producers, and the lack of data regarding the configuration of a machine prevents people from computing probabilities and other mathematical indicators. In this article, I argue that there is no rational justification for this secrecy for two reasons: one psychological and the other mathematical. For the latter, I show that mathematics provides us with some statistical methods of retrieving the missing data, which are essential for numerical probability computations in slots. The slots case described herein raises the problem of exposing the parametric configuration and mathematical facts of any game of chance as an ethical obligation.

Games of chance are developed in their physical consumer-ready form on the basis of mathematical models, which stand as the premises of their existence and represent their physical processes. There is a prevalence of statistical and probabilistic models in the interest of all parties involved in the study of gambling – researchers, game producers and operators, and players – while functional models are of interest more to math-inclined players than problem-gambling researchers. In this paper I present a structural analysis of the knowledge attached to mathematical models of games of chance and the act of mathematical modeling, arguing that such non-standard knowledge holds potential in the prevention and cognitive treatment of excessive gambling, and I propose further research in this direction.

Within educational science and communication science, the concepts of scientific literacy and effectiveness of science communication have been intensely debated in relation to the free types of education, but the research did not focus on the specificity of their target (the general public) in relation to the specificity of their object (science). In general, research maintained an exclusively externalist view for these concepts and associated them with the complexity and diversity of teaching science and less with the epistemic dimension of science communication as a transfer of understandable knowledge in particular conditions.This prospected research advances an internalist view on these concepts, aiming to answer the question of whether science communication (with a conceptual meaning that embeds understanding, message, and goal) to the general public is possible and in what form, within an epistemological theoretical framework.

Every time a new book on gambling mathematics is published, the first question arising is whether its target audience is players or mathematics students. Establishing one of these two options is no...