Business Statistics Assignment

Three historical application of statistics –

1) The concept of mode was used back in the 5th century BCE by the Athenians. The
objective of using this statistical measure was to estimate the height of the ladder
required to climb the walls of Platea, for this they started off by calculating the
height of the wall of Platea. They made the soldiers count the number of bricks that
was visible in an unplastered section of the wall which was close enough for them to
count. This counting was repeated by many soldiers and the observations were
recorded and finally the most frequent value, i.e., mode was determined and this
was finalized as the total number of bricks. The mode value was then multiplied by
the height of a brick. The end result was the height of the entire wall and thus the
Athenians were able to find the height of the ladder that they required to climb over
the wall of Platea.

2) Since the 12th Century, the Royal Mint has been performing a test to check the purity
of the coinage in their reserves. They call it the “trial of the pyx”. This Trial of pyx,
uses statistical sampling methods to check the purity. The Royal Mint after minting a
series of coins, used to pick out one coin randomly and that coin was kept in the pyx
which is a box in Westminster Abbey. After a given period of time, these coins were
taken out of the box, weighed and then a sample of the coins was taken for the
purity check.

3) Roughly around 841 CE, Al-Kindi wrote a book on how to decipher a cryptic message
using statistics and frequency analysis. The deciphering of the message was based
on the number of occurrence of a letter in the cryptic message and in a plain text of
the same language as of the cryptic code which was long enough to fill one sheet.