" Statistics "

" Statistics "

branch of mathematics that deals with the collection, organization, and analysis of numerical data and with such problems as experiment design and decision making.

History.

Simple forms of statistics have been used since the beginning of civilization, when pictorial representations or other symbols were used to record numbers of people, animals, and inanimate objects on skins, slabs, or sticks of wood and the walls of caves. Before 3000 bc the Babylonians used small clay tablets to record tabulations of agricultural yields and of commodities bartered or sold. The Egyptians analyzed the population and material wealth of their country before beginning to build the pyramids in the 31st century bc. The biblical books of Numbers and 1 Chronicles are primarily statistical works, the former containing two separate censuses of the Israelites and the latter describing the material wealth of various Jewish tribes. Similar numerical records existed in China before 2000 bc. The ancient Greeks held censuses to be used as bases for taxation as early as 594 bc. See CENSUS.

The Roman Empire was the first government to gather extensive data about the population, area, and wealth of the territories that it controlled. During the Middle Ages in Europe few comprehensive censuses were made. The Carolingian kings Pepin the Short and Charlemagne ordered surveys of ecclesiastical holdings: Pepin in 758 and Charlemagne in 762. Following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, William I, king of England, ordered a census to be taken; the information gathered in this census, conducted in 1086, was recorded in the DOMESDAY BOOK, (q.v.). Registration of deaths and births was begun in England in the early 16th century, and in 1662 the first noteworthy statistical study of population, Observations on the London Bills of Mortality, was written. A similar study of mortality made in Breslau, Germany, in 1691 was used by the English astronomer Edmund Halley as a basis for the earliest mortality table. In the 19th century, with the application of the scientific method to all phenomena in the natural and social sciences, investigators recognized the need to reduce information to numerical values to avoid the ambiguity of verbal descriptttion.

At present, statistics is a reliable means of describing accurately the values of economic, political, social, psychological, biological, and physical data and serves as a tool to correlate and analyze such data. The work of the statistician is no longer confined to gathering and tabulating data, but is chiefly a process of interpreting the information. The development of the theory of PROBABILITY, (q.v.) increased the scope of statistical applications. Much data can be approximated accurately by certain probability distributions, and the results of probability distributions can be used in analyzing statistical data. Probability can be used to test the reliability of statistical inferences and to indicate the kind and amount of data required for a particular problem