Annotated Readings in the History of Statistics

The Introduction of the Concept of Expectation: Comments on Pascal (1654).- The First Formal Test of Significance: Comments on Arbuthnott (1710).- Coincidences and the Method of Inclusion and Exclusion: Comments on Montmort (1713), N. Bernoulli (1713), and de Moivre (1718).- On the Game of Thirteen.- Letter from Nicholas Bernoulli to Montmort on the Game of Thirteen, reproduced in Montmort (1713, p. 301).- The Doctrine of Chances, Problem XXV.- The Determination of the Accuracy of Observations: Comments on Gauss (1816).- The Determination of the Accuracy of Observations.- The Introduction of Asymptotic Relative Efficiency: Comments on Laplace (1818).- On the Probability of Results Deduced by Methods of any Kind from a Large Number of Observations.- The Logistic Growth Curve: Comments on Verhulst (1845).- Mathematical Investigations on the Law of Population Growth.- Goodness-of-Fit Statistics: The Distributions in Normal Samples of (a) the Sum of Squares About the Population Mean, (b) the Circular Sum of Squares of Successive Differences, and (c) the Circular Serial Correlation Coefficient: Comments on Abbe (1863).- On the Conformity-to-a-Law of the Distribution of Errors in a Series of Observations.- The Distribution of the Sample Variance Under Normality: Comments on Helmert (1876b).- The Calculation of the Probable Error from the Squares of the Adjusted Direct Observations of Equal Precision and Fechner’s Formula.- The Random Walk and Its Fractal Limiting Form: Comments on Venn (1888).- Estimating a Binomial Parameter Using the Likelihood Function: Comments on Thiele (1889).- Yule’s Paradox (“Simpson’s Paradox”): Comments on Yule (1903).- Beginnings of Extreme-Value Theory: Comments on Bortkiewicz (1922a) and von Mises (1923).- Range and Standard Deviation.-On the Range of a Series of Observations.- The Evaluation of Tournament Outcomes: Comments on Zermelo (1929).- The Evaluation of Tournament Results as a Maximization Problem in Probability Theory.- The Origin of Confidence Limits: Comments on Fisher (1930).- Appendix A. English Translations of Papers and Book Extracts of Historical Interest.- Appendix B. First (?) Occurrence of Common Terms in Statistics and Probability.- Name Index.