Brief history of statistics

The Oxford English etymological dictionary defines statistics as follows:

statistics - first applied to the political science concerned with the facts of a state or community XVIII; all derived immediately from German statistisch adj., statistik sb.; whence statistician XIX.

Statistics is concerned with exploring, summarising, and making inferences about the state of complex systems. As summarised in Table 1.1, the development of statistics in Europe was strongly motivated by the need to make sense of the large amount of data collected by population surveys in the emerging nation states. At the same time, the mathematical foundations for statistics advanced significantly due to breakthroughs in probability theory inspired by games of chance (gambling). For more information about the history of statistics refer to the books by Johnson and Kotz (1998) and Kotz and Johnson (1993).

 

Table 1.1: Summary of some key events in the development of statistics in Europe. For more historical details, refer to Johnson and Kotz (1998).

Year	Event	Person
1532	First weekly data on deaths in London	Sir W. Petty
1539	Start of data collection on baptisms, marriages, and deaths in France
1608	Beginning of parish registry in Sweden
1662	First published demographic study based on bills of mortality	J. Graunt
1693	Publ. of An estimate of the degrees of mortality of mankind drawn from curious tables of the births and funerals at the city of Breslaw with an attempt to ascertain the price of annuities upon lives	E. Halley
1713	Publ. of Ars Conjectandi	J. Bernoulli
1714	Publ. of Libellus de Ratiocinus in Ludo Aleae	C. Huygens
1714	Publ. of The Doctrine of Chances	A. De Moivre
1735	Start of demographic data collection in Norway
1763	Publ. of An essay towards solving a problem in the Doctrine of Chances	Rev. Bayes
1809	Publ. of Theoria Motus Corporum Coelestium	C.F. Gauss
1812	Publ. of Théorie analytique des probabilités	P.S. Laplace
1834	Establishment of the Statistical Society of London
1839	Establishment of the American Statistical Association (Boston)
1889	Publ. of Natural Inheritance	F. Galton
1900	Development of the $\chi ^2$ test	K. Pearson
1901	Publ. of the first issue of Biometrika	F. Galton et al.
1903	Development of Principal Component Analysis	K. Pearson
1908	Publ. of The probable error of a mean	``Student''
1910	Publ. of An introduction to the theory of statistics	G.U. Yule
1933	Publ. of On the empirical determination of a distribution	A.N. Kolmogorov
1935	Publ. of The Design of Experiments	R.A. Fisher
1936	Publ. of Relations between two sets of variables	H. Hotelling
1972	Publ. of Regression models and life tables	D.R. Cox
1972	Publ. of Generalized linear models	J.A. Nelder and R.W.M. Wedderburn
1979	Publ. of Bootstrap methods: another look at the jackknife	B. Efron