Interest in the his tory of statistics has grown substantially in recent years and the subject is now covered by a number of excellent books. S. M. Stigler's The History of Statistics (19S6) gives an overview up to 1900 while Anders Hald's two encyclopedic volumes A History of Probability and Statistics before 1750 and A History of Mathematical Statistics f'T'Om 1750 to 1930, published in 1990 and 1995, provide detailed mathematical discussion of the major contributions up to 1930. Hald's books have re moved Isaac Todhunter's A History of Probability from the pedestal which it occupied for a century and a quarter and rendered Karl Pearson's Lec ture Notes of mainly historical interest themselves. Journal papers have appeared on specific topics, especially in the series "Studies in the History of Probability and Statistics" in Biometrika and in the long sequence of papers in Archive for the History of the Exact Sciences by O. Sheynin. The two volumes of reprinted papers, mostly from Biometrika, issued in 1970 and 1977 have proved particularly valuable. More recently, many important papers published since 1900 have been reprinted with commentaries in the three-volume Breakth'T'Oughs in Statistics (1992-1997). Stigler's Statistics on the Table (1999) provides illuminating vignettes. In addition, specialized books have appeared on particular topics, such as A. I. Dale's A History of Inverse P'T'Obability (1991, 1999) and R. W. Fare brother's Fitting Linear Relationships (199S). The pioneering book on the early period, F. N.
Author(s): H. A. David, A. W. F. Edwards (auth.)
Series: Springer Series in Statistics
Edition: 1
Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 252
Tags: Statistical Theory and Methods; Statistics, general
Front Matter....Pages i-xv
The Introduction of the Concept of Expectation Comments on Pascal (1654)....Pages 1-6
The First Formal Test of Significance....Pages 7-17
Coincidences and the Method of Inclusion and Exclusion....Pages 19-23
On the Game of Thirteen....Pages 25-29
Letter from Nicholas Bernoulli to Montmort on the Game of Thirteen, reproduced in Montmort (1713, p. 301)....Pages 31-31
The Doctrine of Chances....Pages 32-36
The Determination of the Accuracy of Observations....Pages 37-40
The Determination of the Accuracy of Observations....Pages 41-49
The Introduction of Asymptotic Relative Efficiency....Pages 51-55
On the Probability of Results Deduced by Methods of any Kind from a Large Number of Observations....Pages 57-64
The Logistic Growth Curve....Pages 65-67
Mathematical Investigations on the Law of Population Growth....Pages 69-75
Goodness-of-Fit Statistics....Pages 77-79
On the Conformity-to-a-Law of the Distribution of Errors in a Series of Observations....Pages 81-101
The Distribution of the Sample Variance Under Normality....Pages 103-107
The Calculation of the Probable Error from the Squares of the Adjusted Direct Observations of Equal Precision and Fechner’s Formula....Pages 109-113
The Random Walk and Its Fractal Limiting Form....Pages 115-128
Estimating a Binomial Parameter Using the Likelihood Function....Pages 129-136
Yule’s Paradox (“Simpson’s Paradox”)....Pages 137-143
Beginnings of Extreme-Value Theory....Pages 145-150
Range and Standard Deviation....Pages 151-153
On the Range of a Series of Observations....Pages 155-160
The Evaluation of Tournament Outcomes....Pages 161-166
The Evaluation of Tournament Results as a Maximization Problem in Probability Theory....Pages 167-186
The Origin of Confidence Limits....Pages 187-201
Back Matter....Pages 247-254
