1654 | Blaise Pascal is the first to develop the
theory of probability. He is known for Pascal's Triangle,
and was the first known person to apply the laws of probability
to gambling. |
1662 | John Graunt writes Natural and Political
Observations upon the Bills of Mortality.
He was the first demographer to use statistics to estimate
the population of London. |
1718 | Abraham de Moivre writes
Doctrine of Chances.
He is the first to write down the formula for the normal
histogram and the first to state the
Central Limit Theorem, which states that if a random variable
is a sum of many independent influences, then
that random variable is approximately normally distributed.
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1722 | Roger Cotes published Opera Miscellanea.
It is a study of the theory of errors, particularly in
astronomy. |
1809 | Carl Friedrich Gauss discovers the
Method of Least Squares, the standard method for fitting a regression line to data. |
1835 | Adolphe Quetelet publishes a study of human measurements
that describes "the average man" that nature is trying
to produce. He shows that human measurements tend to follow
normal histograms. He is the first to introduce the
body mass index that is still used today. |
1888 | Sir Francis Galton first introduced the concept of
correlation, which describes the degree of linear association
between two measurements, such as height and weight. |
1890 | R. A. Fisher is born. Many call him the father of
modern statistics. He popularized the use of the standard deviation to
estimate the spread of a dataset, as well as many other statistical
techniques. |
1977 | John Tukey published the book
Exploratory Data Analysis.
It popularized many of the techniques we will study in this class.
He also coined the terms "bit" and "software." He died in 2000. |