John Michael Gabriel Zaragoza

Instructor
 Origin of the word “Statistics”
• Derived from Latin statisticum collegium
(“council of state”)
• Italian word statista (“statesman” or
“politician”)
• German book Statistik, published in 1749,
described the analysis of demographic and
economic data about the state (political
arithmetic in English)
 Origin of the word “Statistics”
• Was broadened in 1800s to include the
collection, summary, and analysis of data of
any type; also was conjoined with probability
for the purpose of statistical inference.
 During the Early Times
• 5th century B.C. — Athenians estimated the
height of ladders necessary to scale the walls
of Platea by having multiple soldiers count the
bricks, then multiplying the most frequent
count (the mode) by the height of a brick.
• Al-Kindi (801-873 A.D.) wrote “Manuscript on
Deciphering Cryptographic Messages” which
showed how to use frequency analysis to
decipher encrypted messages.
 During the Early Times
• The origin of descriptive statistics can be
traced to ancient Rome and China, the
Babylonians and Egyptians carried censuses in
4500-3000 B.C. It is known that 5 thousand
years BC a population census took place in
China, registration of property was
conducted in ancient Rome
 During the Early Times
• Roman Emperor Augustus (27
B.C.-17 A.D.) conducted
surveys on births and deaths of
the citizens of the empire as
well as the amount of livestock
each owned and the crops each
harvested. In order to use this
information, the Romans had to
develop methods of collecting,
organizing, and summarizing
data
 During the Early Times
• Census by Quirinus, governor of the Roman
province of Judea, is mentioned in Luke’s
Gospel as causing Joseph and Mary to travel
to Bethlehem to be taxed.
 Middle Ages
• In the Middle Ages, censuses of population,
household goods and land were conducted.
• During the fourteenth century, people began
keeping records on births, deaths, and
accidents in order to determine insurance rates
 School of Political arithmetic
• The first scientific school which was much
closer to the modern understanding of statistics
was an English school of political arithmetic.
Its founders were William Petty (1623 - 1687)
and John Graunt (1620 - 1674)
William Petty and John Graunt
 John Graunt
• John Graunt (24 April 1620 - 18 April 1674)
was one of the first demographers. Graunt,
along with William Petty, developed early
human statistical and census methods that later
provided a framework for modern
demography.
– He is credited with producing the first life table,
– giving probabilities of survival to each age.
– one of the first experts in epidemiology
 John Graunt
• John Graunt studied the number of males and
females born. He discovered that slightly more
males were born than females, but that more
males than females died during the first year of
life
 William Petty
• Sir William Petty (27 May 1623 – 16 December 1687)
was an English economist, scientist and philosopher. It
is for his theories on economics and his methods
of political arithmetic that he is best remembered,
however, and he is attributed as having started the
philosophy of 'laissez-faire' in relation to government
activity
• Petty's only statistical technique is the use of simple
averages. He would not be a statistician by today's
standards but during his time a statistician was merely
one that employed the use of quantitative data.
 Gottfried Achenwall
• Gottfried Achenwall(20 October 1719 – 1
May 1772) was a German philosopher and
statistician. He is counted among the inventors
of the term “statistics”
 Adolphe Quetelet
• Adolphe Quetelet (1796
- 1874) should be noted
as a founder of the
mean values theory
• He was influential in
introducing statistical
methods to the social
sciences.
 Carl Friedrich Gauss
• Gauss, with
contributions from
Laplace, derives the
normal distribution –
the bell-shaped curve
fundamental to the
study of variation and
error.
 Some important figures after Laplace and Gauss

• Francis Galton (1822-

1911) — fitted normal
curves to data,
discovered reversion
(later called regression)
to the mean, and
correlation
 Some important figures after Laplace and Gauss

• Francis Edgeworth
(1845-1926) — the first
to compare means of
two populations, using
a precursor to the two-
sample t test
 Some important figures after Laplace and Gauss

• Karl Pearson (1857-

1936) — Introduced
moments, Pearson’s
correlation coefficient,
P-value, Pearson’s chi-
square test, principal
component analysis,
among many other
things
 Some important figures after Laplace and Gauss

• Ronald A. Fisher (1890-

1962) — Introduced
randomization test,
named and promoted
the analysis of variance
and the design of
experiments