The spread of statistical mathematics

Statisticians, wrote the English statistician Maurice Kendall in 1942, “have already overrun every branch of science with a rapidity of conquest rivaled only by Attila, Mohammed, and the Colorado beetle.” The spread of statistical mathematics through the sciences began, in fact, at least a century before there were any professional statisticians. Even regardless of the use of probability to estimate populations and make insurance calculations, this history dates back at least to 1809. In that year, the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss published a derivation of the new method of least squares incorporating a mathematical function that soon became known as the astronomer’s curve of error, and later as the Gaussian or normal distribution.

The problem of combining many astronomical observations to give the best possible estimate of one or several parameters had been discussed in the 18th century. The first publication of the method of least squares as a solution to this problem was inspired by a more practical problem, the analysis of French geodetic measures undertaken in order to fix the standard length of the metre. This was the basic measure of length in the new metric system, decreed by the French Revolution and defined as 1/40,000,000 of the longitudinal circumference of the Earth. In 1805 the French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre proposed to solve this problem by choosing values that minimize the sums of the squares of deviations of the observations from a point, line, or curve drawn through them. In the simplest case, where all observations were measures of a single point, this method was equivalent to taking an arithmetic mean.

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Gauss soon announced that he had already been using least squares since 1795, a somewhat doubtful claim. After Legendre’s publication, Gauss became interested in the mathematics of least squares, and he showed in 1809 that the method gave the best possible estimate of a parameter if the errors of the measurements were assumed to follow the normal distribution. This distribution, whose importance for mathematical probability and statistics was decisive, was first shown by the French mathematician Abraham de Moivre in the 1730s to be the limit (as the number of events increases) for the binomial distribution (see the figure). In particular, this meant that a continuous function (the normal distribution) and the power of calculus could be substituted for a discrete function (the binomial distribution) and laborious numerical methods. Laplace used the normal distribution extensively as part of his strategy for applying probability to very large numbers of events. The most important problem of this kind in the 18th century involved estimating populations from smaller samples. Laplace also had an important role in reformulating the method of least squares as a problem of probabilities. For much of the 19th century, least squares was overwhelmingly the most important instance of statistics in its guise as a tool of estimation and the measurement of uncertainty. It had an important role in astronomy, geodesy, and related measurement disciplines, including even quantitative psychology. Later, about 1900, it provided a mathematical basis for a broader field of statistics that came to be used by a wide range of fields.

Statistical theories in the sciences

The role of probability and statistics in the sciences was not limited to estimation and measurement. Equally significant, and no less important for the formation of the mathematical field, were statistical theories of collective phenomena that bypassed the study of individuals. The social science bearing the name statistics was the prototype of this approach. Quetelet advanced its mathematical level by incorporating the normal distribution into it. He argued that human traits of every sort, from chest circumference (see the figure) and height to the distribution of propensities to marry or commit crimes, conformed to the astronomer’s error law. The kinetic theory of gases of Clausius, Maxwell, and the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann was also a statistical one. Here it was not the imprecision or uncertainty of scientific measurements but the motions of the molecules themselves to which statistical understandings and probabilistic mathematics were applied. Once again, the error law played a crucial role. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution law of molecular velocities, as it has come to be known, is a three-dimensional version of this same function. In importing it into physics, Maxwell drew both on astronomical error theory and on Quetelet’s social physics.