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 statisticianXIX.

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

Publ. of An estimate of the degrees of mortality of mankind drawn from

1693 curious tables of the births and funerals at the city of Breslaw with an E. Halley
attempt to ascertain the price of annuities upon lives

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 Thorie analytique des probabilits 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 K. Pearson
Development of the test
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

J.A. Nelder and

1972 Publ. of Generalized linear models R.W.M.
Wedderburn

1979 Publ. of Bootstrap methods: another look at the jackknife B. Efron