Statistics has existed since the beginning of civilization itself. One could argue that “has it been a brick wall since the beginning?”. Well, not really, it took many centuries to develop the subject itself. Just like how humans and societies evolved over time, the meaning of statistics changed every time someone made a new discovery or dug deeper into the nuances of the subject.
Every area of science has had its origins etched into the most basic phenomenon being explored by curious minds. Maybe that’s why, I found it quite fascinating how humans developed such simple concepts into something more complex. Perhaps, it’s a part of our traits as complex creatures.
Early Development
Like every government nowadays, census was under a different back then when we had empires with kings and queens. This was more than two millennia’s ago, so the only reason for doing such survey would only be manpower or taxes. The concept of counting the financial earnings and the number of birth and deaths in a country can be dated back to at least 5th century BCE. Ancient civilizations like Egypt, Rome, and others used statistical methods in the most rudimentary form.
The art of recording public data (called official statistics now) like the population count, commerce and trade, education, etc. had not been officially termed yet but the concept had existed since for more than 2000 years. Arithmetic mean was a known concept to the Greeks!
During this era, Statistics was defined as the art of counting and recording data to know the political and administrative state of a country. But like every new idea, it took a lot of time for statistics to develop and branch into various fields.
16th to 18th century
During this era, there wasn’t any significant changes noticed in the development of statistics or the tasks carried out to collect data. It was the usual routine of collecting data to know the demographic and the economic state of a country.
Although the term “statistics” was first coined by the Italian scholar, Girolamo Ghilini, its birth as a scientific subject starts with the book “Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality” written by John Graunt and Sir William Petty in the year 1662. This also gave birth to demography as a subject. The idea of life insurance too started during this era in London!
Indeed, the mathematical foundations of Statistics were established through gambling. In a literal sense, it was a game of chance. Mathematicians who were also gamblers in France, Germany, and England, such as Pascal and Fermat, formulated the theory of probability and games of chance. It's quite remarkable that all this took place in the 17th century!
Many other contributors to the field during this era who worked on the theory and doctrine of probability and chances include — De-Moivre, Bernoulli and Laplace. Not to miss Gauss who introduced the famous “Principle of least squares” during this era! I’m sure you must’ve come across the Gaussian Distribution or the normal distribution somewhere in your academic education.
19th century and after
The modern field of statistics came into play only during the late 19th century after a century of rudimentary development in statistics. All it took was progress in the right direction. Every mathematician and statistician inspired one another through their work to pass the baton of progress.
The four main contributors during this era turned the field of statistics more mathematically rigorous by which I mean more formulas and less theory. Everything needed to be proved with logic. Some innovative concepts include introduction of standard deviation, correlation and regression analysis were put forth by Galton. Pearson later introduced concepts like Correlation analysis, Chi-squared test, other tests of significance which are relevant and used to this very moment! Gosset who published his work under the name “student” introduced tests for exact (small) sample test (t-test).
Then comes the father of modern statistics, R.A. Fischer who really applied statistics to many fields like genetics, biometry, education and agriculture, etc. and came up with concepts like estimation theory, design of experiments, exact sampling distributions and Analysis of variance (more commonly known as ANOVA). His contributions really gave space for the 20th century statisticians to further develop the subject. Many statistical tools were created after the rise of computers in the 1960s, making it an interdisciplinary subject. Contributors from India like P.C.Mahalanobis (Father of statistics in India), C.R.Rao, etc. helped develop the field further during this period.
Well, the word ‘statistics’ has had a long journey from the Latin Status to Italian Statista to German Statistik and the English Statistics! Now it’s all about data.
Alas, in its true essence, statistics maybe defined as the science of collection, presentation, analysis and interpretation of numerical data.