Annotated readings in the history of statistics (Q5933375)

This book contains commented publications of fundamental papers on statistics (mathematical statistics) from 1654 up to 1930. The comments and mathematical descriptions of the methods are connected with the publication of the original papers (facsimiles, if the original is in English, or the English translation). The statistical ideas and problems studied and solved by following personalities are treated: Pascal (1654, the concept of expectation); Arbuthnot (1710, the first test of significance); Montmort, Bernoulli and de Moivre (1713, 1713, 1718, chance); Gauss (1816, the accuracy of observations); Laplace (1818, asymptotic relative efficiency); Verhulst (1845, the logistic curve); Abbe (1863, goodness-of-fit); Helmert (1876, the distribution of a sample variance); Venn (1888, random walks); Thiele (1889, estimating a binomial parameter); Yule (1903, Yule's and Simpson's paradox); Bortkiewicz and von Mises (1922-1923, extreme values); Zermelo (1929, the evaluation of tournament outcomes); Fisher (1930, confidence theory). The biographical notes are oriented first of all to the scientific activity of the individual scientists. The Appendix B (First occurence of common terms in statistics) is especially interesting.