History of Statistics


1654 -- Pascal -- mathematics of probability, in correspondence with Fermat

1662 -- William Petty and John Graunt -- first demographic studies

1713 -- Jakob Bernoulli -- Ars Conjectandi

1733 -- De Moivre -- Approximatio; law of error (similar to standard deviation)

1763 -- Rev. Bayes -- An essay towards solving a problem in the Doctrine of Chances, foundation  for "Bayesian statistics"

1805 -- A-M Legendre -- least square method

1809 -- C. F. Gauss -- Theoria Motus Corporum Coelestium

1812 -- P. S. Laplace -- Théorie analytique des probabilités

1834 -- Statistical Society of London established

1853 -- Adolphe Quetelet -- organized first international statistics conference; applied statistics to biology; described the bell-shaped curve

1877 -- F. Galton -- regression to the mean

1888 -- F. Galton -- correlation

1889 -- F. Galton -- Natural Inheritance

1900 -- Karl Pearson -- chi square; applied correlation to natural selection

1904 -- Spearman -- rank (non-parametric) correlation coefficient

1908 -- "Student" (W. S. Gossett) -- The probable error of the mean; the t-test

1919 --  R. A. Fisher -- ANOVA; evolutionary biology

1930's -- Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson (son of Karl Pearson) -- type II errors, power of a test, confidence intervals