Early beginnings 450 BC Hippias of Elis 1303 A Chinese diagram entitled “The Old uses the average value 400 BC In the Indian epic the Mahabharata, King Rtuparna estimates the Method Chart of the Seven Multiplying of the length of a king’s number of fruit and leaves (2095 fruit and 50 000 000 leaves) on two great Squares” shows the binomial coefficients reign (the mean) to work branches of a vibhitaka tree by counting the number on a single twig, then AD 7 Census by Quirinus, governor of the Timeline of statistics 1188 Gerald of up to the eighth power – the numbers that 1346 Giovanni Villani’s Nuova out the date of the first multiplying by the number of twigs. The estimate is found to be very close to Roman province of Judea, is mentioned in 10th century The earliest known graph, in a commentary on a Wales completed are fundamental to the mathematics of Cronica gives statistical Olympic Games, some 300 the actual number. This is the first recorded example of sampling – “but this Luke’s Gospel as causing Joseph and Mary to book by Cicero, shows the movements of the planets through the the first population probability, and that appeared five hundred information on the population years before his time. knowledge is kept secret”, says the account. travel to Bethlehem to be taxed. zodiac. It is apparently intended for use in monastery schools. census of Wales. years later in the west as Pascal’s triangle. and trade of Florence. Photo: Matthias Kabel Matthias Photo: Roman Gudyma/iStock/Thinkstock Roman byggarn79/iStock/Thinkstock 500 400 300 200 100 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000 Statistics is about gathering data and working out what the numbers can 431 BC Attackers besieging Plataea in the Peloponnesian AD 2 Chinese census under the 840 Islamic mathematician Al-Kindi uses 1069 Domesday Book: survey 1150 Trial of the Pyx, an annual test of the purity tell us. From the earliest farmer estimating whether he had enough grain war calculate the height of the wall by counting the Han dynasty finds 57.67 million frequency analysis – the most common for William the Conqueror of of coins from the Royal Mint, begins. Coins are to last the winter to the scientists of the Large Hadron Collider confirming number of bricks. The count was repeated several times people in 12.36 million symbols in a coded message will stand farms, villages and livestock in drawn at random, in fixed proportions to the number the probable existence of new particles, people have always been making by different soldiers. The most frequent value (the mode) households – the first census for the most common letters – to break his new kingdom – the start of minted. It continues to this day. inferences from data. Statistical tools like the mean or average summarise was taken to be the most likely. Multiplying it by the from which data survives, and secret codes. Al-Kindi also introduces official statistics in England. Snarikov/iStock/ Anton Thinkstock height of one brick allowed them to calculate the length still considered by scholars to Arabic numerals to Europe. data, and standard deviations measure how much variation there is within a of the ladders needed to scale the walls. have been accurate. set of numbers. Frequency distributions - the patterns within the numbers 1886 Philanthropist Charles Booth begins or the shapes they make when drawn on a graph - can help predict future 1761 The Rev. Thomas his survey of the London poor, to produce his events. Knowing how sure or how uncertain your estimates are is a key part Bayes proves Bayes’ 1835 Belgian Adolphe Quetelet’s 1854 John Snow’s “cholera map” “poverty map of London”. Areas were coloured iStock/Thinkstock of statistics. theorem – the cornerstone 1791 First use of the word Treatise on Man introduces social pins down the source of an outbreak black, for the poorest, through to yellow for of conditional probability “statistics” in English, by Sir science statistics and the concept of as a water pump in Broad Street, the upper-middle class and wealthy. Today vast amounts of digital data are transforming the world and the Mathematical foundations and the testing of beliefs John Sinclair in his Statistical the “average man” – his height, body London, beginning the modern way we live in it. Statistical methods and theories are used everywhere, from and hypotheses. Account of Scotland. mass index, and earnings. study of epidemics. health, science and business to managing traffic and studying sustainability 1868 Minard’s graphic and climate change. No sensible decision is made without analysing the data. 1654 Pascal and diagram of Napoleon’s March The way we handle that data and draw conclusions from it uses methods Fermat correspond 1713 Jacob Bernoulli’s Ars 1789 Gilbert White and other 1808 Gauss, with 1840 William Farr sets up the on Moscow shows on one about dividing stakes 1663 John Graunt conjectandi derives the law of 1749 Gottfried Achenwall clergymen-naturalists keep contributions from Laplace, official system for recording diagram the distance covered, 1898 Von Bortkiewicz’s data on deaths whose origins and progress are charted here. 1560 Gerolamo Cardano in gambling games uses parish records large numbers – the more often coins the word “statistics” (in records of temperatures, dates derives the normal distribution causes of death in England and the number of men still alive of soldiers in the Prussian army from Julian Champkin calculates probabilities and together create to estimate the you repeat an experiment, German, Statistik); he means of first snowdrops and cuckoos, – the bell-shaped curve Wales. This allows epidemics to be at each kilometre of the horse kicks shows that apparently rare Significance magazine of different dice throws the mathematical population of the more accurately you can the information you need to etc; the data is later useful for fundamental to the study of tracked and diseases compared – march, and the temperatures events follow a predictable pattern, for gamblers. theory of probability. London. predict the result. run a nation state. study of climate change. variation and error. the start of medical statistics. they encountered on the way. the Poisson distribution. iStock/Thinkstock Jackson/iStock/Thinkstock Brian 1560 1580 1600 1620 1640 1660 1680 1700 1720 1740 1760 1780 1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 4 0. 1570 Astronomer Tycho 1644 Michael van Langren 1657 Huygens’s 1693 Edmund Halley prepares the 1728 Voltaire and his mathematician 1757 Casanova becomes a 1790 First US census, taken 1805 Adrien-Marie 1839: The American Statistical 1859 Florence Nightingale uses statistics of 1894 Karl Pearson introduces the term Brahe uses the arithmetic draws the first known graph On Reasoning in first mortality tables statistically friend de la Condamine spot that a trustee of, and may have by men on horseback directed Legendre introduces the Association is formed. Alexander Crimean War casualties to influence public “standard deviation”. If errors are normally .3 mean to reduce errors in his of statistical data that Games of Chance is relating death rates to age – the Paris bond lottery is offering more in had a hand in devising, by Thomas Jefferson, counts method of least squares Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie opinion and the War Office. She shows casualties distributed, 68% of samples will lie within 20 estimates of the locations of shows the size of possible the first book on foundation of life insurance. He also prize money than the total cost of the French national lottery. 3.9 million Americans. for fitting a curve to a and President Martin Van Buren month by month on a circular chart she devises, one standard deviation of the mean. Later he 0. 34.1% 34.1% stars and planets. errors. It is of different probability theory. drew a stylised map of the path of a the tickets; they corner the market given set of observations. will become members. the “Nightingale rose”, forerunner of the pie develops chi-squared tests for whether two .1 2.1% 2.1% estimates of the distance He also invented the solar eclipse over England – one of and win themselves a fortune. chart. She is the first woman member of the variables are independent of each other. 0.1% 13.6% 13.6% 0.1% 00 between Toledo and Rome. pendulum clock. the first data visualisation maps. Royal Statistical Society and the first overseas 0. 1786 William −3σ −2σ −1σ µ21σ σ 3σ Mwtoews Playfair introduces 1833 The British Association for the 1849 Charles Babbage member of the American Statistical Association. graphs and bar Advancement of Science sets up a designs his “difference charts to show statistics section. Thomas Malthus, engine”, embodying economic data. who analysed population growth, and the ideas of data 1877 Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, Charles Babbage are members. It later handling and the modern describes regression to the mean. In 1888 he introduces the concept of becomes the Royal Statistical Society. computer. Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s niece, correlation. At a “Guess the weight of writes the world’s first an Ox” contest in Devon he describes Kim/iStock/Peter Thinkstock 1900 Louis Bachelier 1916 During the First World War 1935 R. A. Fisher computer program for it. the “Wisdom of Crowds” – that the shows that fluctuations in car designer Frederick Lanchester 2002 Paul DePodesta uses 1924 Walter revolutionises modern average of many uninformed guesses stock market prices behave develops statistical laws to predict 1948-53 The Kinsey Report 1950s Genichi Taguchi’s statistical statistics – “sabermetrics” Shewhart invents statistics.