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Some Aspects of the Development of Modern Statistical Method*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2016
Extract
There are two main roots to the tree of modern statistical method : the longer one takes us back to the mathematical investigations into games of chance of the seventeenth and eighteenth century mathematicians, the other starts with the statistical researches of Quetelet and Galton.
Of the former we are told by Poisson “that a problem, relative to games of chance, proposed to an austere Jansenist by a man of the world, was the origin of the calculus of probabilities”.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Mathematical Association 1935
Footnotes
*
Chairman's address to the Study Group of the Royal Statistical Society, 1934-35.
References
page no 18 † note A’ s chance is to B’s as 244,140,625 to 282,429,536,481.
page no 24 * note I have translated the titles from the Latin.
page no 24 † note Quetelet had certainly done this much earlier. Since writing the above I have found an example of a normal curve fitted to the chest circumferences of 5738 Scottish soldiers in his Lettres sur la Théorie des Probabilités published in 1846.
997. A Cambridge tutor of high reputation was once trying to familiarise a beginner with the difference between na and an. After repeated illustration, he asked the pupil whether he saw the point. “Thank you very much, Mr. -------”, was the answer ; “I now see perfectly what you mean: but, Mr.--------, between ourselves, now, and speaking candidly, don't you think it’s a needless refinement ? ”—A. De Morgan, Carnb. Phil. Trans., vol. x (1864), p. 183, f.n. [Per Dr. G. J. Lidstone.]