HISTORY OF STATISTICS

In the 9th century, the Islamic mathematician, Al-Kindi, was the first to use statistics
to decipher encrypted messages and developed the first code-breaking algorithm in the House
of Wisdom in Baghdad, based on frequency analysis. He wrote a book entitled Manuscript on
Deciphering Cryptographic Messages, containing detailed discussions on statistics.[1] It
covers methods of cryptanalysis, encipherments, cryptanalysis of certain encipherments, and
statistical analysis of letters and letter combinations in Arabic.[2]
In the early 11th century, Al-Biruni's scientific method emphasized repeated experimentation.
Biruni was concerned with how to conceptualize and prevent both systematic errors and
observational biases, such as "errors caused by the use of small instruments and errors made
by human observers." He argued that if instruments produce errors because of their
imperfections or idiosyncratic qualities, then multiple observations must be taken, analyzed
qualitatively, and on this basis, arrive at a "common-sense single value for the constant
sought", whether an arithmetic mean or a "reliable estimate.

The Word statistics have been derived from Latin word “Status” or the Italian word
“Statista”, meaning of these words is “Political State” or a Government. Shakespeare used a
word Statist is his drama Hamlet (1602). In the past, the statistics was used by rulers. The
application of statistics was very limited but rulers and kings needed information about lands,
agriculture, commerce, population of their states to assess their military potential, their
wealth, taxation and other aspects of government.

Gottfried Achenwall used the word statistik at a German University in 1749 which means that
political science of different countries. In 1771 W. Hooper (Englishman) used the word
statistics in his translation of Elements of Universal Erudition written by Baron B.F Bieford,
in his book statistics has been defined as the science that teaches us what is the political
arrangement of all the modern states of the known world. There is a big gap between the old
statistics and the modern statistics, but old statistics also used as a part of the present
statistics.

During the 18th century the English writer have used the word statistics in their works, so
statistics has developed gradually during last few centuries. A lot of work has been done in
the end of the nineteenth century.

At the beginning of the 20th century, William S Gosset was developed the methods for
decision making based on small set of data. During the 20th century several statistician are
active in developing new methods, theories and application of statistics. Now these days the
availability of electronics computers is certainly a major factor in the modern development of
statistics.
FAMOUS STATISTICIANS

R. A. Fisher

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS (1890 - 1962) was an English statistician, evolutionary
biologist, and geneticist. Richard Dawkins described him as "The greatest of Darwin's
successors", and the historian of statistics Anders Hald said "Fisher was a genius who almost
single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science".His contributions to
experimental design, analysis of variance, and likelihood based methods have led some to
call him "The Father of Statistics".

Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson (1857 - 1936) was a major contributor to the early development of statistics, and
founder of the world's first university statistics department at University College London in
1911. He was also an ardent and controversial proponent of eugenics. His most famous
contribution is the Pearson's chi-square test.

Gertrude Cox

Gertrude Mary Cox (1900 - 1978) was an influential American statistician and founder of the
department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was later
appointed director of both the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North
Carolina and the Statistics Research Division of North Carolina State University. Her most
important and influential research dealt with experimental design; she wrote an important
book on the subject with W. G. Cochran. In 1949 Cox became the first female elected into the
International Statistical Institute and in 1956 she was president of the American Statistical
Association.

Frank Yates

Frank Yates (1902 - 1994) was one of the pioneers of 20th century statistics. He worked on
the design of experiments, including contributions to the theory of analysis of variance and
originating Yates' algorithm and the balanced incomplete block design. He became an
enthusiast of electronic computers, in 1954 obtaining an Elliott 401 for Rothamsted and
contributing to the initial development of statistical computing.

Kirstine Smith

Kirstine Smith (1878 - 1939) was born in Denmark. She was admitted as a candidate for a
doctorate in statistics in 1916 at the University of London and wrote a thesis that was a
precursor to modern optimal design theory, published in 1918 Biometrika. Karl Pearson
considered her to be one of his most brilliant mathematical statisticians. Her work with
Pearson on minimum chi-square spurred a controversial dialog between Pearson and Fisher,
and led to Fisher’s introduction of sufficient statistics. She returned to teaching in Denmark
and ended her career there.
John Tukey

John Wilder Tukey (1915 - 2000) was a professor of Statistics at Princeton University. A
mathematician by training, his statistical interests were many and varied. He contributed
significantly to what is today known as the jackknife procedure. He introduced the box plot in
his 1977 book, Exploratory Data Analysis.He also contributed to statistical practice and
articulated the important distinction between exploratory data analysis and confirmatory data
analysis, believing that much statistical methodology placed too great an emphasis on the
latter.
.

Student (William Sealy Gosset)

William Sealy Gosset (1876 - 1937) was a chemist and statistician, better known by his pen
name Student. He worked in a beer brewery and his testing of very small patches led him to
discover certain small-sample distributions.This led to the development of Student's t-Test.
His communications with Fisher on the subject are legendary.

George E. P. Box

George Edward Pelham Box, born on October 18, 1919, was a pioneer in the areas of quality
control, time series analysis, and design of experiments. Still on the engineering faculty of
University of Wisconsin, he is well-known for the quote “…all models are wrong, but some
are useful”. His books Statistics for Experimenters and Time Series Analysis: Forecasting
and Control are classic texts.

David R. Cox

Sir David R. Cox, born in 1924, is a British statistician who has made pioneering and
important contributions to numerous areas of statistics and applied probability. Perhaps the
best known of his many developments is the proportional hazards model, which is widely
used in the analysis of survival data. He is now an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College and
a member of the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford.

Jerome H. Friedman

Jerome H. Friedman is one of the world's leading researchers in statistical data mining. He
has been a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University for nearly 20 years and has published
on a wide range of data mining topics including nearest neighbor classification, logistic
regression, and high-dimensional data analysis, and machine learning.
Bradley Efron

Professor Efron is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, president of the American
Statistical Association, recipient of the MacArthur Prize, and winner of the Wilks Medal of
the American Statistical Association. Professor Efron is renowned internationally for his
pioneering work in computationally intensive statistical methods, particularly the bootstrap
method and the biased coin design. He is still a very active researcher, having worked more
recently in statistical genetics.

F. N. David

Florence Nightingale David (1909 – 1993), a great statistician and a fighter for increasing
women’s roles in the sciences, began her career as a research assistant in Karl Pearson’s
laboratory. During World War II, she became an experimental officer and senior statistician
for the Research and Experiments Department, and was scientific advisor on mines for the
military. David felt that the war gave women more opportunities and that conditions for them
are now better because of it. After serving as a lecturer and professor at University College
for many years, in 1970 she was offered the chair of statistics at the University of California
at Riverside.