Statistics & its Principal Contributors
From IIITM-k-wiki
Statistics & and its Principal Contributors
Statistics as a subject concerned with scientific methods for collecting, organizing, summarizing and analyzing data and as well as with drawing valid conclusions and making Field and Technical Services LLC reasonable decisions on the basis of such analysis.The word Statistics derived from the Italian word Statista means ‘�Political Status’.
Collection of data for administrative purpose was in existence even before the birth of Christ. In India the collection of data for administrative purpose was there from iphone photography the reign of Chandra Gupta Maurya (324-300 B C)
The following notes on the Principal Contributors of Statistics is an attempt to think through the historical settings of Statistics. James Bernoulli (1654-1705) Best known for the work Ars Conjectandi (The Art of Conjecture). In this work, he described the known results in probability theory and in enumeration, often providing alternative proofs of known results. This work also includes the application of probability theory to games of chance and his introduction of the theorem known as the law of large numbers. The terms Bernoulli trial and Bernoulli numbers result from this work. The Bernoulli crater, on the Moon, is also named after him jointly with his brother Johann.
Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754) French mathematician famous for de Moivre's formula, which links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory. The Doctrine of Chances is a book on probability theory by Abraham de Moivre, published in 1718.. It is reported in all seriousness that de Moivre correctly predicted the day of his own death. Noting that he was sleeping 15 minutes longer each day, De Moivre surmised that he would die on the day he would sleep for 24 hours. A simple mathematical calculation quickly yielded the date, November 27, 1754. He did indeed pass away on that day.
Thomas Bayes (1702- 1761) English theologian and mathematician Thomas Bayes has greatly contributed to the field of probability and statistics. He established a mathematical basis for probability inference .Perhaps Bayes's most well known paper is his Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances. This paper was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1764. This paper contains a statement of a special case of Bayes' theorem. Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) German mathematician, generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians who is sometimes called the "prince of mathematics." He contributed in Statistical Estimation. He perfected systematic fitting of regression both simple and multiple regression by method of least squares.
Fransic Galton (1822-1911) The great man of measurement, of "anything and everything" was Sir Francis Galton. Overshadowed in popular accounts by his cousin Charles Darwin, the significance of Galton's practical contributions to society has remained largely undervalued. His contribution to the field Statistics is in the development of regression analysis. Further to these achievements, he was one of the first individuals to realize the importance of posted questionnaires. The study of heredity could only be placed on a scientific basis by introducing new statistical concepts like Regression analysis and correlation.
Karl Pearson (1857-1936) Established the discipline of mathematical statistics. In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London. He was a proponent of eugenics, and a prot�gé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. He was also a socialist.His main contributions to the world of Statistics are 1. Linear regression and correlation - Pearson was instrumental in the development of this theory. One of his classic data sets (originally collected by Galton) involves the regression of sons' height upon that of their fathers'. Pearson built a 3-dimensional model of this data set (which remains in the care of the Statistical Science Department) to illustrate the ideas. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient is named after him, and it was the first important effect size to be introduced into statistics. 2. Classification of distributions - Pearson's work on classifying probability distributions forms the basis for a lot of modern statistical theory; in particular, the exponential family of distributions underlies the theory of generalized linear models. 3. Pearson's chi-square test - A particular kind of chi-square test, a statistical test of significance.
William Sealy Gosset- (1876-1937)- Best known by his pen name Student William Gosset was never employed as a statistician. In 1908 he discovered Student's t-distribution, which was the starting of a new era in Statistics. He did mathematical research for beer brewing, but had the problem working with only a small sample size. His papers were on the probability of error of the mean and of the correlation coefficient. Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962)- Reffered as the Father of Statistics deserve the credit for the most of the modern development in Statistics. On the Mathematical Foundations of Theoretical Statistics (1922) and Theory of Statistical Estimation (1925) advanced a new theory of estimation in opposition to the Bayesian approach. It emphasised maximum likelihood as an efficient way of extracting information from the data. Statistical Methods for Research Workers, was Fisher�s most influential statistics book. It is essentially a book of significance test recipes. Behind the recipes was the system of sampling distributions based on the normal distribution
Sim�on Denis Poisson ( 1781- 1840) The famous mathematician established The Poisson distribution which provides a useful way to assess the percentage of time when a given range of results will be expected (such as the number of telephone calls at a business or the number of accidents at an intersection) Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao One of the brightest stars in the Indian sky of Statistics and Mathematics born in 1912.An exceptional academician, he is a dedicated soul in the development of Statistics and his works earned him the honor of Padma Bhusan. Among his best-known discoveries are the Cram�r-Rao bound and the Rao-Blackwell theorem both related to the quality of estimators. Other areas he worked in include multivariate analysis, estimation and differential geometry. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis(1912-1972) He founded the Indian Statistical Institute on 17 December, 1931. His most important contributions are related to large scale sample surveys. He introduced the concept of pilot surveys and advocated the usefulness of sampling methods. the Mahalanobis model, was employed in the Second Five Year Plan, which worked towards the rapid industrialization of India and with other colleagues at his institute, he played a key role in the development of a statistical infrastructure.He is best known for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure.During the last decade of his life, he devised a statistical method, fractile graphical analysis, for comparison of socio-economic conditions of groups of people. This technique has now been used in many other branches of science.
References: http://www.economics.soton.ac.uk/staff/aldrich/fisherguide/rafreader.htm
History of Statistics by R A Fisher
