Emil,
Thank you so much. It is a bit murky to me as to what are the precursors of statistics prior to the 20th century, especially back to the ancient world. Stephen Stigler's book on the seven pillars of wisdom of statistics suggested Aggregation, Information, Likelihood, intercomparison, regression, design, and residual. This is quite a nice book, and one of the few on the history of statistics but starts out in the modern era.
What I would like to know is what was happening before the 20th century. I am reaching out to historians in Egypt to try and find out. Where does Arabic numbers, census, gambling, probability fit?
It is amazing to me that in departments of the history and philosophy of science there is very little on the history and philosophy of statistics, despite you all being at the core of science. I wonder why
You seemed to imply that probability is separate from statistics.
It might at some point to have a conference on the history and philosophy of statistics, from the pyramids to big data
The diagram produced by the ASA on history could be a good starting point.
Sorry about the Musing of an epidemiologist, but we are building the largest historical archive of statistic at the library of alexandria. It would be wonderful to have a Mesopotamia cuneiform from 3000 years ago that describes Chi Square!!!
Thanks for all your help...also, think of donating your statistic books, old a new, to the Library of Alexandria. Euclid will love it
ron
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Ronald LaPorteProfessor EmeritusDept. Epidemiology
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-09-2017 12:21
From: Emil Friedman
Subject: gambling, statistics, and building a historical data base of statistics
Perhaps we should distinguish between probability and statistics. Unless one is testing whether the dice (or dice thrower) are fair, we are dealing with probability.
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Emil M Friedman, PhD
emilfriedman@gmail.com
http://www.statisticalconsulting.org
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-08-2017 09:38
From: Ronald LaPorte
Subject: gambling, statistics, and building a historical data base of statistics
Friends,
I have been reading about the foundations of statistics in the ancient world (especially Egypt). There does not appear to be much documentation. Several anecdotal sources view gambling, in particular dice as a core to probability and statistics. Dice have been found with the mummies of Egypt, as well as mentioned in Mesopotamia, Sumatra and other places. Also as Fritz told me gambling has been rather ubiquidous throughout history and society. Any thoughts about the relationship of gambling, and statistics? If you would like send a note to
ronaldlaporte@gmail.com.
The reason I am interested is that if we can find evidence that Egypt is one of the cradles for the development of statistics, it would be nice to draw a line from ancient egypt dice, and birth of statistics, to Deming, to Big data at the Serageldin Library of Alexandria.
The largest library in the world is the Library of Congress, with 16,000,000 books, the Library of alexandria currently has 3,000,000. However, the library of Congress has 4098 statistics books, while the BA Serageldin library, 6711, and soon to be 15000. We are capturing the history of statistics by examining the epidemiology of statistics books. Please consider contributing your dusty old statistics books to help young investigators, as well as to build the nearly complete history of statistics in the 20th century.
ron
This history of statistics is most fascinating
ron
Global Health, so near, so far
"Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". (WHO)
Ronald E. LaPorte, Ph.D.
Emeritus Director WHO Collaborating Center
Professor Emeritus Epidemiology
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Telephone home 724 934 9023 Mobile 724 759 3283