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History of Statistics

At the beginning, “statistics” related to the activities concerning the registration of a country in the fields of population, assets, tax, ... The origin of term “statistics” is “state”. In Latin, “statisticum collegium” means “national council”. In Germany language, “statistik” mean “activities concerning data of a country". So the first statistical publication realized by John Graunt in 1663 related to studies about population.

In 17th century, Fermat and Pascal studied the theory of probability, an important foundation of statistics. Then this mathematical branch has developed with the contribution of Bernoulli, Huygens. In the first half of 18th century, Cotes and Simpson investigated the error. In the last half of this century, Laplace contributed to the development of statistics with the calculations of combinatory analysis.

In 19th century, some theories and methods, for example least square method, probability of error, correlation coefficient r, estimation, hypothesis tests, confident interval were studied by excellent scientists like Gauss, Laplace, Pearson, Pierce. Statistics was also applied in other fields of science like statistical mechanics, experiment design. Social sciences also used statistical methods in investigation of social phenomena.

In 20th century, Fisher invented the techniques of analysis of variance (ANOVA). Based on ANOVA, a lot of new methods are developed and applied widely in science, industry, commerce and business. And the development of computer facilitates considerably statistical calculations, and statistics is applied more and more.