Timeline of statistics

Early beginnings

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450 bc Hippias of Elis 1303 A Chinese diagram entitled The Old

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uses the average value 400 bc In the Indian epic the Mahabharata, King Rtuparna estimates the Method Chart of the Seven Multiplying

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of the length of a kings number of fruit and leaves (2095 fruit and 50000000 leaves) on two great Squares shows the binomial coefficients
reign (the mean) to work branches of a vibhitaka tree by counting the number on a single twig, then ad 7 Census by Quirinus, governor of the 1188 Gerald of up to the eighth power the numbers that 1346 Giovanni Villanis Nuova
out the date of the first multiplying by the number of twigs. The estimate is found to be very close to Roman province of Judea, is mentioned in 10th century The earliest known graph, in a commentary on a Wales completed are fundamental to the mathematics of Cronica gives statistical
Olympic Games, some 300 the actual number. This is the first recorded example of sampling but this Lukes Gospel as causing Joseph and Mary to book by Cicero, shows the movements of the planets through the the first population probability, and that appeared five hundred information on the population
years before his time. knowledge is kept secret, says the account. travel to Bethlehem to be taxed. zodiac. It is apparently intended for use in monastery schools. census of Wales. years later in the west as Pascals triangle. and trade of Florence.

500 400 300 200 100 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000

Statistics is about gathering data and working out what the numbers can

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431 bc Attackers besieging Plataea in the Peloponnesian ad 2 Chinese census under the 840 Islamic mathematician Al-Kindi uses 1069 Domesday Book: survey 1150 Trial of the Pyx, an annual test of the purity tell us. From the earliest farmer estimating whether he had enough grain
war calculate the height of the wall by counting the Han dynasty finds 57.67million frequency analysis the most common for William the Conqueror of of coins from the Royal Mint, begins. Coins are to last the winter to the scientists of the Large Hadron Collider confirming

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number of bricks. The count was repeated several times people in 12.36million symbols in a coded message will stand farms, villages and livestock in drawn at random, in fixed proportions to the number the probable existence of new particles, people have always been making
by different soldiers. The most frequent value (the mode) households the first census for the most common letters to break his new kingdom the start of minted. It continues to this day.
inferences from data. Statistical tools like the mean or average summarise
was taken to be the most likely. Multiplying it by the from which data survives, and secret codes. Al-Kindi also introduces official statistics in England.
height of one brick allowed them to calculate the length still considered by scholars to Arabic numerals to Europe. data, and standard deviations measure how much variation there is within a
set of numbers. Frequency distributions - the patterns within the numbers

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of the ladders needed to scale the walls. have been accurate.
1761 The Rev. Thomas
Bayes proves Bayes
theorem the cornerstone
of conditional probability
Mathematical foundations and the testing of beliefs
and hypotheses.
1886 Philanthropist Charles Booth begins or the shapes they make when drawn on a graph - can help predict future
his survey of the London poor, to produce his events. Knowing how sure or how uncertain your estimates are is a key part
1835 Belgian Adolphe Quetelets 1854 John Snows cholera map poverty map of London. Areas were coloured
black, for the poorest, through to yellow for of statistics.
1791 First use of the word Treatise on Man introduces social pins down the source of an outbreak
statistics in English, by Sir science statistics and the concept of as a water pump in Broad Street, the upper-middle class and wealthy. Today vast amounts of digital data are transforming the world and the
John Sinclair in his Statistical the average man his height, body
mass index, and earnings.
London, beginning the modern
study of epidemics.
way we live in it. Statistical methods and theories are used everywhere, from
health, science and business to managing traffic and studying sustainability
Account of Scotland.
1868 Minards graphic and climate change. No sensible decision is made without analysing the data.

1654 Pascal and
Fermat correspond
about dividing stakes
1560 Gerolamo Cardano in gambling games
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diagram of Napoleons March
1713 Jacob Bernoullis Ars 1789 Gilbert White and other 1808 Gauss, with 1840 William Farr sets up the on Moscow shows on one
The way we handle that data and draw conclusions from it uses methods
1663 John Graunt conjectandi derives the law of 1749 Gottfried Achenwall clergymen-naturalists keep contributions from Laplace, official system for recording diagram the distance covered, 1898 Von Bortkiewiczs data on deaths whose origins and progress are charted here.
uses parish records large numbers the more often coins the word statistics (in records of temperatures, dates derives the normal distribution causes of death in England and the number of men still alive of soldiers in the Prussian army from Julian Champkin

calculates probabilities and together create to estimate the you repeat an experiment, German, Statistik); he means of first snowdrops and cuckoos, the bell-shaped curve Wales. This allows epidemics to be at each kilometre of the horse kicks shows that apparently rare Significance magazine
of different dice throws the mathematical population of the more accurately you can the information you need to etc; the data is later useful for fundamental to the study of tracked and diseases compared march, and the temperatures events follow a predictable pattern,
for gamblers. theory of probability. London. predict the result. run a nation state. study of climate change. variation and error. the start of medical statistics. they encountered on the way. the Poisson distribution.

1560 1580 1600 1620 1640 1660 1680 1700 1720 1740 1760 1780 1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000

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1570 Astronomer Tycho 1644 Michael van Langren 1657 Huygenss 1693 Edmund Halley prepares the 1728 Voltaire and his mathematician 1757 Casanova becomes a 1790 First US census, taken 1805 Adrien-Marie 1839: The American Statistical 1859 Florence Nightingale uses statistics of 1894 Karl Pearson introduces the term

0.3
Brahe uses the arithmetic draws the first known graph On Reasoning in first mortality tables statistically friend de la Condamine spot that a trustee of, and may have by men on horseback directed Legendre introduces the Association is formed. Alexander Crimean War casualties to influence public standard deviation. If errors are normally
mean to reduce errors in his of statistical data that Games of Chance is relating death rates to age the Paris bond lottery is offering more in had a hand in devising, by Thomas Jefferson, counts method of least squares Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie opinion and the War Office. She shows casualties distributed, 68% of samples will lie within

0.2
34.1% 34.1%
estimates of the locations of shows the size of possible the first book on foundation of life insurance. He also prize money than the total cost of the French national lottery. 3.9 million Americans. for fitting a curve to a and President Martin Van Buren month by month on a circular chart she devises, one standard deviation of the mean. Later he
stars and planets. errors. It is of different probability theory. drew a stylised map of the path of a the tickets; they corner the market given set of observations. will become members. the Nightingale rose, forerunner of the pie develops chi-squared tests for whether two

0.1
2.1% 2.1%
estimates of the distance He also invented the solar eclipse over England one of and win themselves a fortune. chart. She is the first woman member of the variables are independent of each other.

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0.1% 13.6% 13.6% 0.1%
between Toledo and Rome. pendulum clock. the first data visualisation maps. Royal Statistical Society and the first overseas

0.0
1786 William 3 2 1 1 2 3
Playfair introduces 1833 The British Association for the 1849 Charles Babbage member of the American Statistical Association.
graphs and bar Advancement of Science sets up a designs his difference   
  
charts to show statistics section. Thomas Malthus, engine, embodying 
 


economic data. who analysed population growth, and the ideas of data 1877 Francis Galton, Darwins cousin,  


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describes regression to the mean. In

 
Charles Babbage are members. It later handling and the modern





 
 
 
 

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becomes the Royal Statistical Society. computer. Ada Lovelace, 1888 he introduces the concept of 




 

 
 
Lord Byrons niece, correlation. At a Guess the weight of 


 



writes the worlds first an Ox contest in Devon he describes  
1900 Louis Bachelier 1916 During the First World War 1935 R. A. Fisher  
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computer program for it. the Wisdom of Crowds that the

shows that fluctuations in car designer Frederick Lanchester 1924 Walter revolutionises modern 2002 Paul DePodesta uses 
average of many uninformed guesses
stock market prices behave develops statistical laws to predict Shewhart invents statistics. His Design of 1948-53 The Kinsey Report 1950s Genichi Taguchis statistical statistics sabermetrics

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is close to the correct value.
in the same way as the the outcomes of aerial battles: if the control chart Experiments gives ways of 1940-45 Alan Turing at Bletchley Park cracks 1946 Coxs theorem gathers objective data on human methods to improve the quality of to transform the fortunes 2012 Nate Silver, statistician,
random Brownian motion you double their size land armies to aid industrial deciding which results of the German wartime Enigma code, using derives the axioms of sexual behaviour. A large-scale automobile and electronics components 1979 Bradley Efron introduces 1997 The term of the Oakland Athletics successfully predicts the result in

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of molecules the start of are only twice as strong, but air production and scientific experiments are advanced Bayesian statistics and Colossus, the probability from simple survey of 5000 men and, later, revolutionise Japanese industry, which bootstrapping, a simple way to estimate the Big Data first baseball team; the film all 50 states in the US Presidential
financial mathematics. forces are four times as powerful. management significant and which are not. first programmable electronic computer. logical assumptions. 5000 women, it causes outrage. far overtakes western European rivals. distribution of almost any sample of data. appears in print. Moneyball tells the story. election. He becomes a media star.

1900 1904 1908 1912 1916 1920 1924 1928 1932 1936 1940 1944 1948 1952 1956 1960 1964 1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012

Modern era 1908 William Sealy Gosset, chief 1911 Herman Hollerith, 1935 George Zipf finds that many 1937 Jerzy Neyman introduces 1944 The German tank problem: the 1948 Claude Shannon 1950 Richard Doll 1958 The KaplanMeier 1972 David Coxs 1977 John Tukey 1982 Edward Tufte 1988 Margaret Thatcher 1993 The statistical 2002 The amount of 2004 Launch 2008 Hal Varian, chief 2012 The Large Hadron Collider

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brewer for Guinness in Dublin, inventor of punch-card phenomena river lengths, city confidence intervals in statistical Allies desperately need to know how many introduces information theory and Bradford Hill estimator gives doctors a simple proportional hazard introduces the box-plot or self-publishes The Visual becomes the first world programming language information stored of Significance economist at Google, confirms existence of a Higgs

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describes the t-test. It uses a small devices used to analyse populations obey a power law so testing. His work leads to Panther tanks they will face in France on and the bit fundamental establish the link statistical way of judging which model and the concept box-and-whisker diagram, Display of Quantitative leader to call for action R is released, now a digitally surpasses magazine. says that statistics will boson-like particle with

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number of samples to ensure that data in US censuses, that the largest is twice the size of modern scientific sampling. D-Day. Statistical analysis of the serial to the digital age. between cigarette treatments work best. It has of partial likelihood. which shows the quartiles, Information, setting new on climate change. standard statistical tool. non-digital. be the sexy profession probability of five standard

Bundesarchiv,

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every brew tastes equally good. merges his company to the second largest, three times the numbers on gearboxes from captured smoking and lung saved millions of lives. medians and spread of standards for graphic of the next ten years. deviations around one chance
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form what will become size of the third, and so on. tanks indicates how many of each are cancer. Despite data in a single image. visualisation of data. in 3.5 million that all they are

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IBM, pioneers of machines being produced. Statisticians predict 270 fierce opposition the seeing is coincidence.

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to handle business data a month; reports from intelligence sources result is conclusively

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and of early computers. predict many fewer. The total turned out to proved, to huge

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be 276. Statistics had outperformed spies. public health benefit.