The History of Statistics

Statistics is one of those disciplines, relatively rare, which

leads an unconfined existence. Unlike zoology or geometry,
statistics ministers to an immense variety of needs, both
academic and practical. The techniques and skills of statistical
science serve the quantum physicist, the economist, the
sociologist, the psychologist; they are to be found at work in
virtually all government departments, bureaucracies, and
corporations which shape and control the modern world. How
many people poring in puzzlement over complex numerical
tabulations have paused to wonder where and when the
characteristic ideas and methods of this powerful and
pervasive discipline originated and grew to maturity?
Stephen Stigler has the answers to such questions in this
lengthy, technical, and learned history of statistics. The story
he tells is a European one, with a specifically English finale. It
covers the two centuries between 1700 and 1900, that period
in which the discipline of statistics was formed out of the
concepts and requirements of several diverse fields. His
guiding theme is the notion of uncertainty, which is the main
preoccupation of modern statistical thinking. All scientific
activities which engage with and depend upon measurement
have to be concerned with uncertainty, the degree to which
measured quantities and the propositions based upon them are
accurate. Uncertainty, technically speaking, is the name of the
concepts and techniques which estimate quantitative accuracy,
and is at the heart of the statistical enterprise.
Stigler partly discerns the origins of this science of uncertainty
within the problems encountered by astronomers in the
eighteenth century. The elimination of potential errors was of
vital importance for astronomy, because crucial theoretical
issues, notably those of planetary and lunar motion, depended
on the degrees of accuracy which could be brought to bear
computationally upon observations of complex dynamical
systems. This line of origin traced by Stigler therefore runs
through a tradition of mathematician-astronomers, such as
Pierre-Simon Laplace, culminating with Adrien Legendres
formulation of the method of least squares of 1805. The other
route he follows is the sequence of efforts made by
mathematicians to produce an effective probability calculus;
first, by showing how the chances of error decrease as the
number of observations increase and, second, by performing
calculations based upon the mean value of results produced by
observation. With the following of such methods, it was
claimed, large errors would almost certainly be eliminated,
and the likelihood of small errors persisting would be
considerably diminished.
The motivations for such work, and the store of empirical
materials upon which it drew, indicate a largeness and

complexity to the question of the origins of statistical science

that is not immediately apparent in Stiglers opening chapters.
By the eighteenth century, astronomy was a long-established
and thoroughly mathematicized discipline, and it is therefore
unremarkable that astronomers in their pursuit of theoretical
accuracy should contribute significantly to the design of
mathematical techniques for the elimination of error.
Nevertheless, equally striking in the eighteenth century was
the drive, both general and profound, to submit the whole
observable world to number and measure where at all
possible. This drive was apparent not merely where one might
have expected it, in experimental physical sciences such as
electricity and chemistry. It was equally present in attempts to
formulate a viable social science which might prove as
successful for the understanding, prediction, and control of the
social world as physics and astronomy had proved for the
natural world. The eighteenth century was in this sense a
scientistic age, and mathematicians such as Laplace, who
pursed the possibility of a genuine social science, were by no
means untypical in their pursuit.
Stigler, in his close and necessary focus on technical
mathematical advances, is by no means unaware of these
larger features of eighteenth century development, but in his
account, for the eighteenth century at least, the quest for social
science remains in the background, and statistics moves into
the nineteenth century armed with its technical achievements
in probability theory and error distribution.
With the advent of Adolphe Quetelets work in the 1820s, the
issue of the historical relationship of statistics to social science
became more pressing, and Stigler presents Quetelets project
as a definitive step toward incorporating probability theory
within practical social science. The first half of the nineteenth
century was a period of great expansion for practical statistics,
with work going forward especially in the study of population
and of public health. Quetelets early...

Statistics is concerned with exploring,

summarising, and making inferences about
the state of complex systems.
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, a British statistician, is
considered by many to be the father of the modern
science of statistics. The Danish statistician Anders
Hald recognized him as a genius who built the
foundations for modern statistical science.