History and Development of Statistics

Simple forms of statistics have been used since the beginning of civilization, when pictorial
representations or other symbols were used to record numbers of people, animals, and
inanimate objects on skins, slabs, or sticks of wood and the walls of caves. Before 3000 BC the
Babylonians used small clay tablets to record tabulations of agricultural yields and of
commodities bartered or sold. The Egyptians analyzed the population and material wealth of
their country before beginning to build the pyramids in the 31st century bc. The biblical books
of Numbers and 1 Chronicles are primarily statistical works, the former containing two
separate censuses of the Israelites and the latter describing the material wealth of various
Jewish tribes. Similar numerical records existed in China before 2000 BC. The ancient Greeks
held censuses to be used as bases for taxation as early as 594 BC. The Roman Empire was the
first government to gather extensive data about the population, area, and wealth of the
territories that it controlled.
During the Middle Ages in Europe few comprehensive censuses were made. The Carolingian
kings Pepin the Short and Charlemagne ordered surveys of ecclesiastical holdings: Pepin in
758 and Charlemagne in 762. Following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, William I,
king of England, ordered a census to be taken; the information gathered in this census,
conducted in 1086, was recorded in the DOMESDAYBOOK. Some scholars pinpoint the origin
of statistics to 1662, with the publication of Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills
of Mortality by John Graunt. Early applications of statistical thinking revolved around the
needs of states to base policy on demographic and economic data, hence its stat- etymology.
The scope of the discipline of statistics broadened in the early 19th century to include the
collection and analysis of data in general.
Today, statistics is widely employed in government, business, and the natural and social
sciences. Because of its empirical roots and its focus on applications, statistics is usually
considered to be a distinct mathematical science rather than a branch of mathematics. Its
mathematical foundations were laid in the 17th century with the development of probability
theory by Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat. Probability theory arose from the study of games
of chance. The method of least squares was first described by Carl Friedrich Gauss around
1794.
The use of modern computers has expedited large-scale statistical computation, and has also
made possible new methods that are impractical to perform manually .G. Achenwall is usually
credited with being the first to use the word " statistics," but statistics, in the modern sense of
the word, did not really come into existence until the publication (1761) byJ. P. Sussmilch, a
Prussian clergyman, of a work entitled Die glittliche Ordnung in denVeranderungen des
menschlichen Geschlechts aus der Geburt, dem Tode, and der Fortpflanzungdesselben
erwiesen. In this book a systematic attempt was made to make use of a class of factswhich up
to that time had been regarded as belonging to "political arithmetic," under which description
some of the most important problems of what modern writers term "vital statistics had been
studied, especially in England. Sussmilch had arrived at a perception of the advantage of
studying what Quetelet subsequently termed the "laws of large numbers." He combined the
method of "descriptive statistics" with that of the "political arithmeticians," who had confined
themselves to investigations into the facts regarding mortality and a few other similar subjects,
without much attempt at generalizing from them.
The mathematical methods of statistics emerged from probability theory, which can be dated to
the correspondence of Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal (1654). Christiaan Huygens (1657)
gave the earliest known scientific treatment of the subject. Jakob Bernoulli's Ars
Conjectandi(posthumous, 1713) and Abraham de Moivre's Doctrine of Chances (1718) treated
the subject as a branch of mathematics.[1] In the modern era, the work of Kolmogorov has
been instrumental in formulating the fundamental model of Probability Theory, which is used
throughout statistics. The theory of errors may be traced back to Roger Cotes' Opera
Miscellanea (posthumous, 1722), but a memoir prepared by Thomas Simpson in 1755 (printed

1756) first applied the theory to the discussion of errors of observation. The reprint (1757) of
this memoir lays down the axioms that positive and negative errors are equally probable, and
that there are certain assignable limits within which all errors may be supposed to fall;
continuous errors are discussed and a probability curve is given.