Kenneth Chang

yep, had some citations downthread. I don't expect you (or any other journalist) to know the history yourself,... just hope you know that when history is going to be a part of your story there are folks like me who'd love to help you get it right!

(which is what I said in the next tweet: https://twitter.com/MBarany/status/1240762331493171200 … )

The article doesn't claim Margulis and Furstenberg discovered probability or ergodic theory (which, yes, goes back centuries). I wasn't writing a complete history of dynamical systems. But they used those ideas in new and different ways.

For sure they used it in new ways, but if you read what you wrote (from Labourie inter alia) about the history of these developments, the claims in the article are incorrect, as several historians of 20c math could have told you

Nobody expects you to write a complete history. I think it's reasonable to expect you to want to be correct about the parts of the history you do use.

What specifically was happening in the mid-20th century that Labourie was ignoring?

The specific question you're objecting to appears to be this: "…most mathematicians in the middle of the 20th century did not think much of probability, which was at the bottom in the hierarchy of mathematics, below number theory, algebra and differential geometry."

yes, probability was entirely mainstream in mid-century, embraced as an important method by prestigious folks in many places, including in Labourie's France. It was important in both pure and applied work (a distinction that was being actively re-negotiated in this period).