Timeline of probability and statistics

A timeline of probability and statistics

Contents

1 Before 1600

2 17th century

3 18th century

4 19th century

5 20th century

6 See also

7 External links

[edit] Before 1600

1560s (published 1663) Cardano's Liber de ludo aleae attempts to calculate probabilities of dice throws

1577 Bartolom de Medina defends probabilism, the view that in ethics one may follow a probable opinion even if the opposite is
more probable

[edit] 17th century

1654 Pascal and Fermat create the mathematical theory of probability,

1657 Huygens's De ratiociniis in ludo aleae is the first book on mathematical probability,

1662 Graunt's Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality makes inferences from statistical data on deaths
in London,

1693 Halley prepares the first mortality tables statistically relating death rate to age,

[edit] 18th century

1710 Arbuthnot argues that the constancy of the ratio of male to female births is a sign of divine providence,

1713 Posthumous publication of Jacob Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi, containing the first derivation of a law of large numbers,

1724 Abraham de Moivre studies mortality statistics and the foundation of the theory of annuities in Annuities on Lives,

1733 Abraham de Moivre introduces the normal distribution to approximate the binomial distribution in probability,

1739 Hume's Treatise of Human Nature argues that inductive reasoning is unjustified,

1761 Thomas Bayes proves Bayes' theorem,

1786 Playfair's Commercial and Political Atlas introduces graphs and bar charts of data,

[edit] 19th century

1801 Gauss predicts the orbit of Ceres using a line of best fit

1805 Adrien-Marie Legendre introduces the method of least squares for fitting a curve to a given set of observations,

1814 Laplace's Essai philosophique sur les probabilits defends a definition of probabilities in terms of equally possible cases,
introduces generating functions and Laplace transforms, uses conjugate priors for exponential families, proves an early version of the
Bernstein von-Mises theorem on the asymptotic irrelevance of prior distributions on the limiting posterior distribution and the role of
the Fisher information on asymptotically normal posterior modes.

1835 Quetelet's Treatise on Man introduces social science statistics and the concept of the "average man",

1866 Venn's Logic of Chance defends the frequency interpretation of probability.

18771883 Charles Sanders Peirce outlines frequentist statistics, emphasizing the use of objective randomization in experiments and
in sampling. Peirce also invented an optimally designed experiment for regression.

1880 Thiele gives a mathematical analysis of Brownian motion, introduces the likelihood function, and invents cumulants.

1888 Galton introduces the concept of correlation,

[edit] 20th century

1900 Bachelier analyzes stock price movements as a stochastic process,

1908 Student's t-distribution for the mean of small samples published in English (following earlier derivations in German).

1921 Keynes' Treatise on Probability defends a logical interpretation of probability,

1928 Tippett and Fisher's introduce extreme value theory,

1933 Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov publishes his book Basic notions of the calculus of probability (Grundbegriffe der
Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung) which contains an axiomatization of probability based on measure theory,

1935 R. A. Fisher's Design of Experiments (1st ed),

1937 Neyman introduces the concept of confidence interval in statistical testing,

1946 Cox's theorem derives the axioms of probability from simple logical assumptions,

1948 Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication defines capacity of communication channels in terms of probabilities,

1953 Nicholas Metropolis introduces the idea of thermodynamic simulated annealing methods

[edit] See also

Founders of statistics

List of important publications in statistics

History of probability

History of statistics

[edit] External links

Kees Verduin (2007), A Short History of Probability and Statistics

John Aldrich (2008), Figures from the History of Probability and Statistics

John Aldrich (2008), Probability and Statistics on the Earliest Uses Pages

Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis (2008). "Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data
Visualization: An illustrated chronology of innovations".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_probability_and_statistics