HISTORY OF

STATISTICS AS
A DISCIPLINE
 How it was Started
• A gambler's dispute in 1654 led to the creation of a mathematical theory
of probability by two famous French mathematicians, Blaise Pascal and
Pierre de Fermat

• The birth of statistics is dated to 1662, when John Graunt and William
Petty, developed early human statistical and census methods. (First ever
Life Table)

• The history of statistics in the modern sense dates from the mid-17th
century, with the term STATISTICS itself coined in 1749 in Germany.
 How it was Started

• Some of the famous derivations:-

• Latin word Statisticum Collegium ("council of state")

• Status (Political State)

• Italian word Statista ("statesman" or "politician").

• German word Statistik, first introduced by Gottfried Achenwall (1749)

 Gottfried Achenwall
(20 October 1719 – 1 May 1772)
• German Philosopher, Historian, Economist, Statistician

• Counted among the inventors of Statistics

• German Economists claimed for him the title of "Father of Statistics“.

• He analyzed the data about the state

• Signifying the "Science Of State"
 Approaching 18th Century
• By the 18th century, the term “Statistics" designated the Systematic
Collection of Demographic *and Economic data by states

*Demography
Ancient Greek 1- Dēmos meaning “The people",
2- Graphō, implies "Writing, Description or Measurement"

• The Statistical study of Populations, especially Human Beings

 Approaching 18th Century

• Formal Demography:-

Measurement of Population Processes

• Social Demography:-

Study the relationships between economic, social,

cultural, and biological processes influencing a population.
 Approaching 18th Century
• By 1800, Astronomy used Probability Models and Method Of Least Squares*

*Method of Least Squares grew out of Astronomy And Geodesy

• Firstly the method of least squares was published by Legendre
(French Mathematician) in 1805
• In 1809 Carl Friedrich Gauss published his method of calculating
the orbits of celestial bodies. In that work he claimed to have
been in possession of the method of least squares since 1795.
 Approaching 18th Century

• This naturally led to a priority dispute with Legendre. However, to Gauss's

credit, he went beyond Legendre and succeeded in connecting the method of
least squares with the principles of probability and to the normal
distribution
 Approaching 18th Century
Carl Friedrich Gauss
(30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855)
• German Mathematician
• Ranked among most influential mathematicians
• The Gauss Prize, one of the highest honors in Mathematics
Interesting Fact
His mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on
a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension (which occurs 39 days after Easter). Gauss later
solved this puzzle about his birthdate in the context of finding the date of Easter, deriving methods to compute
the date in both past and future years
 Approaching 18th Century
Some of Gauss Work
• ALGEBRA AND LINEAR ALGEBRA
• GAUSSIAN ELIMINATION
• GAUSS–JORDAN ELIMINATION
• GAUSS–KUZMIN DISTRIBUTION,
• GAUSS–MARKOV PROCESS
• GAUSS–MARKOV THEOREM
• GAUSSIAN COPULA
• GAUSSIAN MEASURE
• GAUSSIAN CORRELATION INEQUALITY
• GAUSSIAN ISOPERIMETRIC INEQUALITY
• GAUSS'S INEQUALITY
 Approaching 18th
Century
Other notable Events
• 1761 Thomas Bayes proved Bayes' theorem

• 1791 Sir John Sinclair introduced the term ‘Statistics' into English in
his Statistical Accounts of Scotland.

• 1802 Laplace estimated the population of France

• The Royal Statistical Society was founded in 1834

 Development of Modern Statistics

• The modern field of statistics only emerged in the late-

19th and early-20th century in three stages.

• The first wave, at the turn of the century, was led by the

work of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson

 Development of modern Statistics
Francis Galton
(16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911)
• English Statistician
• Cousin Of Charles Darwin
• Over 340 Papers And Books
• Variance And Standard Deviation
• Experimental Derivation Of The Normal Distribution
• Bivariate Normal Distribution
• Correlation And Regression Towards Mean
• Questionnaire For Data Collection
• Nature Versus Nurture
 Development of modern Statistics
Karl Pearson
(27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936)
• English Mathematician and Biostatistician

• Founder of Mathematical Statistics

• Pear* Review journal Biometrika (Established in 1901 by Francis Galton, Karl

Pearson, and Raphael Weldon, Published By The Oxford University Press)

• Founder of the world's first university statistics department at University

College London in 1911
 Development of modern Statistics
(Karl Pearson)

• Biographer Of Sir Francis Galton

• Correlation Coefficient

• Method Of Moments

• Chi Distance

• P-value
 Development of modern Statistics
(Karl Pearson)

• Statistical Hypothesis Testing Theory

• Pearson's Chi-squared Test

• Principal Component Analysis

• Histogram
 Development of modern Statistics
• Second wave of the 1910s and 20s was initiated by William Gosset, and
reached its culmination in the insights of Ronald Fisher.
William Sealy Gosset
(13 June 1876 – 16 October 1937)
• English Statistician, Known for The Student’s t Distribution
• Worked with Karl Pearson in 1906 and 1907 (Got help on Mathematics)
• As an employee of Guinness, Gosset applied his statistical knowledge – both in
the brewery and on the farm – to the selection of the best yielding varieties of
barley
 Development of modern Statistics
(William Gosset)
• As per Guinness policy he was not allowed to publish his work under his name
so he had to use pen name Student

• Almost all Papers including The Probable Error of a Mean published in

Biometrika

• Ronald A. Fisher who appreciated the importance of Gosset's small-sample

work, and introduced new form of Student's statistic,
• Gosset had written to him to say I am sending you a copy of Student's
Tables as you are the only man that's ever likely to use them!.
 Development of modern Statistics
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher
(17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962)
A genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern
Statistical Science and the single most important figure in 20th century Statistics
• British Statistician and Geneticist.
• Fellow of the Royal Society
• Isaac Newton (1672),Charles Darwin (1839),Srinivasa Ramanujan (1918), Albert Einstein (1921More
recently, Stephen Hawking (1974), Tim Hunt (1991), Elizabeth Blackburn, Atta-ur Rahman (2006), Andre
Geim (2007), James Dyson (2015), Ajay Kumar Sood (2015), Subhash Khot (2017), Elon Musk (2018)

• Text Books For Academic Discipline Around The World

• Statistical Methods for Research Workers(1925)
• The Design of Experiments (1935)
 Development of modern Statistics
R.A Fisher
• Linear Discriminant Analysis
• Fisher Information
• F-distribution
• Analysis Of Variance
• Fisher–tippett–gnedenko Theorem
• Fisher–tippett Distribution
• Von Mises–fisher Distribution
• Inverse Probability
• Fisher's Inequality
• Sufficient Statistic
• Fisher's Noncentral Hypergeometric Distribution
• Student's t-distribution
• Genetic Theories
 Development of modern Statistics
The final wave, which mainly saw the refinement and expansion of earlier
developments, emerged from the collaborative work between Egon Pearson
and Jerzy Neyman in the 1930s
Egon Sharpe Pearso FRS
(11 August 1895 – 12 June 1980)
• Son of Karl Pearson
• British statistician
• Known throughout the world as co-author of the Neyman-Pearson theory of
testing statistical hypotheses, and responsible for many important contributions to
problems of statistical inference and methodology, especially in the development
and use of the likelihood ratio criterion. Has played a leading role in furthering the
applications of statistical methods — for example, in industry, and also during and
since the war, in the assessment and testing of weapons
 Development of modern Statistics
Jerzy Neyman
(April 16, 1894 – August 5, 1981)
• Polish mathematician and statistician

• Confidence interval

• Hypothesis testing

• Neyman-Pearson lemma

• Stratified Sampling

• Method of Purposive Selection

 Some Notable
Statistician of the
World
Thomas Bayes George E. P. Box Pafnuty Chebyshev David
R. Cox Gertrude Cox Harald Cramér Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
Bradley Efron Bruno de Finetti Ronald A. Fisher
Francis Galton Carl Friedrich Gauss Abraham Wald
William Sealey Gosset ("Student") Al-Kindi Andrey Kolmogorov
Pierre-Simon Laplace Erich L. Lehmann Aleksandr Lyapunov
Anil Kumar Gain Thorvald N. Thiele John Tukey
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis Abraham De Moivre Jerzy Neyman
Florence Blaise Pascal Karl Pearson
Charles S. Adolphe Quetelet C. R. Rao
Walter A. Shewhart Charles Spearman Charles Stein