Today’s world is a world of information. Without information, we would not be able to learn new things and keep ourselves updated on the new occurrences in our surroundings. Information can come in many forms, such as television, books, the internet and word of mouth. It may seem obvious that information plays a very important aspect in our lives, but where exactly does information come from? Most information comes from data and the processing and understanding that we apply to data. This processing and understanding of data is known as statistics.
Statistics is a branch of mathematics that is associated with the collection, analysis and presentation of data. Statistics is used all over the world, every day, by almost everyone. It is something that can be used in a situation as simple as trying to figure out how much of a pizza you have eaten. But, it can also be used in a more complex situation, like when a company tries to compare the effectiveness of two products so that they can choose the best one to sell to the public. Throughout the world, statistics can be seen in almost every field of work and millions of people are doing statistical work throughout the world. Because of its significance in the world, it is not only important that we are not only familiar with statistics and its uses but that we know the history of statistics as well.
Early Stages
The use of statistics can be dated back to the time of the Ancient Greek Empire, by a man named Hippias of Elis. Hippias of Elis was born around 460 BCE, and grew up to be a sophist who worked as a contemporary of Socrates. He had many great accomplishments, but his more important discoveries came from his work as a mathematician. It is widely accepted that Hippias invented the quadratix, which is a curve that is used to trisect angles and to square circles. While this is noted as his most important mathematical discovery, Hippias also used the average length of the reign of the king to calculate the date of the first Olympic Games, which was one of the first recorded uses of statistics. While Hippias was the first person recorded to have used the mean calculation, the use of the mode was recorded in 431 BC during the Peloponnesian War. The Peloponnesian War was a war fought between the people of Athens and the people of Sparta, in ancient Greece. The Spartans needed a way to get over the walls that surrounded the city of Platea which was inhabited by the enemy of the Spartans. In order to get over the walls, the Spartans decided to build ladders, but they did not know how tall to make them. In order to calculate the height of the wall, the soldiers used the number of bricks as a counting method. They repeated this process of counting the number of bricks to find the height of the wall and used the most frequent value, also known as the mode, for their estimate of the height of the wall. They then found the height of a brick, multiplied it by the mode, and were able to build ladders that got them over the walls.
The next big milestone for statistics was in the year 2 AD, during the Han Dynasty in China. Known as the golden age in Chinese history, many great advancements were made during the Han Dynasty. One of the great achievements made was the successful undertaking of an empire-wide census, that allowed government officials to gather information about the numerous districts throughout the empire. From the census, it was recorded that there were 56.67 million people living in a total of 12.36 million households, and scholars today find that such statistics were surprisingly accurate given the lack of technology and resources in such ancient times.
Fast forwarding a bit, we can observe the statistical advancements made in 11th century England with the creation of the Domesday Book. In 1086 AD, William the Conqueror wanted to know the value of the land that he ruled over, so he decided to conduct a grand survey. He enlisted the help of royal commissioners who were sent around his kingdom to record the amount of land that was owned by each landowner and the amount of resources that each landowner had on their land. The whole process took an entire year and by the time it was completed, William the Conqueror had unfortunately passed away and was unable to see the incredible work that he had set forth to complete. Not long after, there was the Trial of Prix which also occurred in the English kingdom. The Trial of Prix was a method by which the Royal Mint would check to see if coins were pure enough. For the test, there would be a random selection of coins that would then be compared to the benchmark for what the coins were supposed to resemble. This is one of the first recorded instances of a sampling, and its effectiveness can be seen from the fact that the Trial of Prix is still continued to this day.
Moving Forward
As society became more advanced, the field of statistics and its uses began to grow, and with frequent discoveries, many new additions were made to the field. In 1501, a man named Girolamo Cardano was born in the town of Pavia, Italy. Cardano was a man of many trades, from mathematician and biologist, to writer and gambler. Mostly known for his work in mathematics, Cardano’s biggest achievements that are recognized today were in the field of algebra. He was the first person in Europe to use negative numbers systematically, he published the solutions to the cubic and quadratic equations, and also was one of the first to acknowledge imaginary numbers. However, his contributions to statistics came not from his mathematical studies, but from his habit of gambling. Shortly after his father died, Cardano turned to gambling in order to make more money for himself, and by doing so he became well versed in probability. He went on to write a book about games of chance, which included the first treatment of probability that was systematic. Unfortunately, his gambling became detrimental to not only his wealth, but his image as well. Nevertheless, it allowed for him to make great contributions to the world of statistics, and it paved the way for more discoveries to be made.
One of the next achievements was made almost a century later by a man by the name of Michael van Langren, who was able to portray statistical errors through the first known drawing of a statistical graph. A couple of years later, in 1654, two well-known mathematicians by the names of Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, worked together to create the mathematical theory of probability. Similar to Cardano, their achievements were largely due to their participation in games of gambling.
In 1657, there was a Dutch man by the name of Christiaan Huygans who published a book that would serve an important role in the history of statistics. Huygans grew up learning math from the famous philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes. Through the knowledge he gained during his mathematical career and his study of the work done by Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, Huygans was able to publish the first book on probability theory. Although this was a significant achievement, Huygans may be more widely known for his invention of the pendulum clock in 1956. A man regarded as one of the greatest scientists to have ever lived, Christiaan Huygans definitely left his mark on the world of statistics.
While many people may not know the name Huygans, it is almost definite that they would have heard the name Bernoulli. Jacob Bernoulli was born in 1655, in Basel, Switzerland. His parents were both came from important families, and growing up, he felt the pressure to be the way his family wanted. At his parents’ wishes, Bernoulli begrudgingly studied philosophy and theology. However, Bernoulli was interested in mathematics and he was able to find time to study it while he was fulfilling what was demanded of him. Due to his mathematical studies on the side, Bernoulli was able to go on to create for himself a successful career in mathematics. However, his best work came after a dispute with his brother, who had also gone on to become a mathematician. With what may have been fueled by ambition to outshine his brother, Bernoulli went on to contribute to the field of probability theory by publishing his law of large numbers in 1713. His law of large numbers is now taught and used in every elementary statistic course in universities around the world.
Another big name in the field of statistics is Bayes, a mathematician from England. Although he was known to be a mathematician, Bayes grew up studying logic and theology throughout his years in university. He went on to study mathematics on his own and came up with his theory of probability. Bayes died before he could publish his theory, but his friend found his work and was able to get it published. Bayes theorem became a very big part in statistics and has gone on to be used by statisticians all over the world. The late 16th century was significant in that it brought the introduction of the United States into the world of statistics. In 1790, the US completed their first census during the presidency of George Washington. The census was carried out under the direction of Thomas Jefferson, who along with a militia of horsemen, was able to record the population of the young nation.
To observe the next achievement in statistics, we must go back to Europe, where things were beginning to move at a fast pace. In 1805, a Frenchman by the name of Adrien-Marie Legendre came up with the procedure for fitting a curve by using the method of least squares. Although he was the first to have done so, a German man by the name of Carl Fredrich Gauss also published a paper including the same procedure. However, much to Legendre’s dismay, his work was given priority over the likes of Legendre. Gauss also was able to derive the normal distribution, but not without the help of Legendre’s work. While it is not clear who deserves more credit for each discovery, both Gauss and Legendre proved to make important contributions to the statistical community.
The 1830’s was important for America and Britain in that both made moves to include sectors in their nations that were dedicated to the field of statistics. After the end of the Peninsular War in 1815, Britain found themselves in a state of exhaustion due to their participation in the war. Seeing that the war had left them in such a poor state, Britain began to partake in post-war reconstruction. However, their reconstruction was slow relative to their neighboring countries and by 1830, they saw that their focus on sciences had been in a state of decline for some while. In an effort to reignite their scientific innovations, the British Association for the Advancement of Science was formed in 1831. Two years later, the association created a new section in their organization that was dedicated to the field of statistics. It was a very popular section within the organization, and it would later go on to become the Royal Statistical Society of Britain. In 1839, a similar organization was formed in the United States. In an effort to aid the statistical efforts of the US government, the American Statistical Association was founded by five members. Some important people who were members of the organization in its early stages included Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie and former President Martin Van Buren. The importance of the American Statistical Association in the US cannot be underestimated and its value is proven by the fact that it remains a prominent institution even to this day.
Another very important member of the association, was Florence Nightingale. Nightingale was born in Florence, Italy on May 12th, 1820. She was born into a wealthy family, but she grew to become a very giving person and she felt the need to serve others. Nightingale’s willingness to serve others translated into her profession as a nurse. As a nurse, she did more than just tend to the sick and injured. Nightingale was known for her work in statistics, and her use of statistics allowed for the improvement of conditions in the hospitals she worked in. While her work in Europe resulted in many reforms in hospitals, she was also an important figure in the other parts of the world. During the Civil War, Nightingale was often contacted for advice on how to manage hospitals that were on the field of battle. She was also consulted regarding the issues of sanitation in India, despite the fact that she had never been there herself. Nightingale was a very important figure in the field of statistics and she was especially important in that she was the first female statistician to have such a big impact in world affairs.
The next influential figure in the history of statistics was a man by the name of Karl Pearson. Pearson was born on March 27th 1857 in London, England to an upper-middle class family. He went to Cambridge on a scholarship to study mathematics, and his brilliance was apparent from his excellence as a student. Pearson had many successes as a mathematician, but one of his greatest successes was his recognition as one of the founders of statistics. He was very interested in the mathematics of heredity and evolution, which led him to write a total of 18 papers on the subject. In the papers, Pearson was able to contribute to the regression analysis, the correlation coefficient, and also coined the term “standard-deviation” through his work. In his work, Pearson also introduced the chi-squared test to the world of statistics.
As we can see, many great things happened in the four centuries following the discoveries of Hippias of Elis in 1501. During this time, many crucial advancements were made in the field of statistics that would be instrumental in what was to come. With every new achievement made by one statistician, the next statistician benefitted from the new information which would in turn spur new developments. Not only did the field of statistics improve during this time period, but the world became more advanced in this time and the need for statistical work became more prevalent.
Modern Times
With the start of the 20th century came the beginning of a brand new chapter in the field of statistics. The new addition was financial mathematics and it came from a man named Louis Bachelier. Bachelier, born in France, was thrown into the world of finance when he had to join his family business after the death of his parents. Having had experience with finances through his family business, Bachelier went on to study mathematics. With what he knew from experience and what he had learned in university, Bachelier came up with the Weiner function, and also went on to show that prices in the stock market followed random Brownian motion. Later on, Einstein would go on to write a paper about Brownian motion, unaware of Bachelier’s work on the Weiner process.
When one thinks of statistics, beer would not be the first thing that comes to mind. However, in 1908 an important step was made in the history of statistics, and that step was made by a man who worked for one of the most famous beer companies in the world, Guinness. William Sealy Gosset was the name of the man hired by the beer company, Guinness. Gosset was hired by Guinness as a chemist, and even though he was a chemist, most of what he did in his life was based on statistics. In fact, Gosset was known to have concentrated on statistics for most of his life, even during the time he was bed ridden after having a motor accident. With such an interest in statistics, it was not surprising that he applied statistical methods when conducting his research at Guinness. As a chemist, Gosset was asked to find the relationship between the raw ingredients used to make the beer, and the final product which was the beer itself. In order to do so, he had to test the quality of the beer once it was made, and to check its consistency, he used what we know as the t-test. He would take a small number of beer samples, and test to see if all the beer was of good quality. For all of the statisticians who are using the t-test around the world today, they are most likely find it absurd that its origins came from a chemist that worked for a beer company.
Fast forward to 1935, the year when modern statistics was revolutionized by Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher. Fisher was born in London, on February 17th, 1890, into a middle class household. He had four siblings, and they faced some incredible hardships growing up. When he was merely 14 years old, Fisher’s mother died, and if that wasn’t bad enough, his father went out of business only a year and a half later. Despite such hardships, Fisher excelled in his studies and displayed his proficiency in mathematics. However, he may not have achieved greatness in mathematics if it weren’t for his poor eyesight, which was the ultimate factor in his rejection from the army at the beginning of the first World War. Following his rejection, Fisher took up the position of chief statistician at Rothamsted Agricultural Experiment Station, which was an agricultural research institute. Fisher made very important contributions to statistics during his time there, including his introduction to the concept of randomization, the analysis of variance and the concept of likelihood. However, his most important contribution was his redefinition of statistics in 1922. His reasoning for this redefinition was in order to reduce the amount of data being used by statisticians. The three main problems that Fisher identified were the specification of population for the data, estimation and distribution. Fisher’s findings were a very important milestone in the history of statistics, and most of the statistics that we do today can be seen as an extension of the work that Fisher did. Without Fisher, modern statistics would not be the way that it is today.
Similarly, to how Fisher made his contributions to statistics during the time of the first World War, a man by the name of Alan Turing made his contributions during the second World War. Turing was born in London, England on June 23rd 1912. From a very early age, Turing’s genius was apparent and he would always tend to go about his own way in school. He was very good at mathematics and he would constantly be winning prizes in mathematics while he was in school. In university, Turing realized that he had an interest in mathematical logic, and so he studied it. One of Turing’s first achievements in statistics was when he independently discovered the central limit theorem. Unfortunately, he was not the first to discover it so he is not accredited for its discovery, but it is still amazing that he was able to discover it on his own without prior knowledge that it had already been discovered. Turing’s real achievement in statistics came in the midst of the second World War. Turing was very interested in computers and his interest led him to construct a device built to investigate what is considered one of the biggest unsolved problems in mathematics. He did this in the years leading up to the war, and it led to him being called upon when the war started. His task during the war was to crack the German Enigma code, so that the British could intercept the German messages during the war. Turing took to the task enthusiastically, and was ignited with ambition by the challenge presented to him. He created Colossus, the first programmable computer in history, and using his computer in tandem with advanced Bayesian statistics, he was able to crack the Enigma code. While Turing did not come up with a new theorem or new discovery in the field of statistics, what he did do was open the doors for making statistical processes easier. The introduction of a programmable computer led to innovation that has allowed us to create machines that revolutionized data collection, statistical analysis and mathematics in general.
One of the main uses for statistics is for the improvement of human conditions. In order to find out what percent of people are suffering from a certain disease, or to find out whether or not a medication is successful in treating a certain illness, statistics is required. One illness that has risen as a significant problem in society is cancer. While today we have many facts and information about cancer and what causes it, it wasn’t so in the mid-20th century. For example, today it is common knowledge that smoking cigarettes causes cancer. However, in 1950 two men were able to establish the connection between smoking and lung cancer, and their findings were opposed fiercely. Those two men were Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll. Both men were from England and they both had a background in the medical field. Together, they conducted a study in hospitals where they compared smokers to non-smokers and with the help of statistics, they came to the conclusion that there was a connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. This achievement made Hill and Doll the joint pioneers of the randomized clinical trial, and also resulted in a beneficial impact on public health around the world.
The year 1958 brought another great change in the medical that was brought about with the help of statistics. The change was created by the introduction of the Kaplan-Meier estimator. Named after Edward Lynn Kaplan and Paul Meier, the estimator calculates the proportion of patients that remain living a certain amount of time after a treatment has been administered to them. This allows for doctors to find successful treatments in a simple and effective manner. The invention of the Kaplan-Meier estimator has resulted in an incredible amount of saved lives. Without statistics, the estimator would not have existed and it would be much harder for doctors to administer the best treatments to their patients.
The next great achievement came from an American named John Wilder Tukey. Tukey was born on June 16th 1915 in Bedford, Massachusetts. His parents realized his potential from a very young age and decided that it would be best if they homeschooled him. This proved to be a good decision because Tukey was able to achieve educational experience at a high level before he even started university. In university, Tukey studied both mathematics and chemistry, but he found himself gravitating more towards becoming a mathematician. Within the field of mathematics, Tukey discovered that he had a knack for statistics and went on to make new contributions to the field. One of his contributions was the creation of the box-and whisker diagram, which is used to show the median, quartiles, and the overall spread of a dataset in a single graph. Tukey also contributed through his method of conducting the spectral analysis of a time series. His contributions to statistics were celebrated by many and he went on to receive the Samuel S. Wilks Award from the American Statistical Association in 1965. The award is given to those who have provided contributions to the statistical community for the betterment of public good, and through his work we can see that Tukey represents exactly what the award stands for.
The next important figure in the history of statistics is a man by the name of Bradley Efron. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota on May 24th 1938, Efron is the first statistician we have looked at so far, that is still alive today. As a statistician, he has been instrumental in contributing to many areas of statistics. Some of his contributions include his work with empirical Bayes analysis, his application of differential geometry to statistical inference, the analysis of survival data, and his work on the inference for microarray gene expression data. However, his most notable work was his introduction of the bootstrapping method. The method he found allows for one to find the estimate of a sampling distribution of nearly any statistic using methods of random sampling. His discovery of the bootstrapping method was so important that he was given the most distinguished scientific honor in the United States. In 2005, Efron was awarded the National Medal of Science, which proves the importance of his contributions to the field of statistics. Efron’s work is so significant that he is set to be the recipient of the International Prize in Statistics in 2019, showing that his work is appreciated worldwide.
The last contribution we will cover in addressing the history of statistics came about in 1993. The contribution was made by two men from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Their names are Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, and together they created the statistical programming language of R. Together they created R as a way to implement the programming language S, which was created by a man named John Chambers in1976. The reason that R is so important as a programming language, and as a tool for statisticians, is because it is free. This means that it is accessible to anyone who has access to a computer, and that it opens the doors for so many new statistical ventures to be made. The introduction of R was also an important milestone in the progression of statistics to a computer based field of study. In fact, by 2002 the computerization of statistics, as well as the movement towards a computer based society, could be seen by the fact that the amount of digitally stored data surpassed the amount of data that was not stored digitally. Ihaka and Gentleman not only helped digitalize the process of statistics, but they did it in a way that made it accessible to anyone who has statistical interests or ambitions.
Conclusion
As we can see, the history of statistics, is one of great importance and has spanned over the course of thousands of years. As societies became more advanced, they encountered a need to incorporate statistics into their lives, in order to progress. A prime example of this can be seen from the Spartan siege of the city of Platea. In order to advance, and overtake their enemies, the Spartans had to turn to statistics to find a way over the walls surrounding the city. As societies progressed even more, discoveries in statistics no longer came from necessity but rather, they came from curiosity. Without the likes of Girolamo Cardano and Christiaan Huygans, and their enthusiastic curiosity, the foundations for statistics may not have existed. Along with others, Cardano and Huygans created the baseline for the future of statistics, allowing people after them to look at their work and make new discoveries. As we moved into modern times, statistics quickly became an integral part of society. From cracking codes during wars, to testing the quality of beer, statistics was used in almost every realm of life, and the profession of statistician became more common. Arguably, the most important application of statistics emerged with its role within public health. The use of statistics to improve the lives of others can be seen with Florence Nightingales work in hospitals, and the incredible research done by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill to find the relation between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. Today, statistics is used in every field, from business to finance to public health. It’s importance in today’s world cannot be underestimated, but it is also imperative that people learn about its rich history, and remain educated about one of the most important fields of study in the world.