The History of Statistics

The second wave of the 1910s and 20s was initiated by William Sealy Gosset, and reached its culmination in the insights of Ronald Fisher, who wrote textbooks that were to define the academic discipline in universities around the world.

He originated the concepts of sufficiency, ancillary statistics, Fisher's linear discriminator, and Fisher information.

The Mid-20th Century

The final wave, which mainly saw the refinement and expansion of earlier developments, emerged from the collaborative work of Egon Pearson and Jerzy Neyman in the 1930s. They introduced the concepts of "Type II" error, the power of a test, and confidence intervals.

Modern Statistics

Today, statistical methods are applied in all fields that involve decision making, to obtain accurate conclusions from a consolidated array of data, making choices under conditions of uncertainty based on statistical methodology.