Synopses & Reviews
WILEY-INTERSCIENCE PAPERBACK SERIES
The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists.
From the Reviews of History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750
"This is a marvelous book . . . Anyone with the slightest interest in the history of statistics, or in understanding how modern ideas have developed, will find this an invaluable resource."
–Short Book Reviews of ISI
Synopsis
Statistics have helped shape every area of science. Without the means to analyze critical data, none of the great disoveries of the past would be possible. This paperback reprint of a Wiley bestseller shows the development of these data analysis tools and the manner in which they aided technological development prior to 1750.
Synopsis
Evoking the life and works of the great natural philosophers who contributed to the development of probability theory and statistics, this bestseller—now available in paperback--also describes the contemporaneous development and interaction of probability theory (and games of chance), statistics (particularly in astronomy and demography), and life insurance mathematics. To read and enjoy this intellectual history, you need know but little statistics or mathematics.
Table of Contents
The Book and Its Relation to Other Works.
A Sketch of the Background in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy.
Early Concepts of Probability and Chance.
Cardano and Liber de Ludo Aleae, c.
1565.
The Foundation of Probability Theory by Pascal and Fermat in 1654.
Huygens and De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae, 1657.
John Graunt and the Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality, 1662.
The Probabilistic Interpretation of Graunt's Life Table.
The Early History of Life Insurance Mathematics.
Mathematical Models and Statistical Methods in Astronomy.
The Newtonian Revolution in Mathematics and Science.
Miscellaneous Contributions Between 1657 and 1708.
The Great Leap Forward, 1708 - 1718: A Survey.
New Solutions to Old Problems, 1708 - 1718.
James Bernoulli and Ars Conjectandi, 1713.
Bernoulli's Theorem.
Tests of Significance Based on the Sex Ratio at Birth and the Binomial Distribution, 1712 - 1713.
Montmort and the Essay d'Analyse sur les Jeux de Hazard, 1708 and 1713.
The Problem of Coincidences and the Compound Probability Theorem.
Nicholas Bernoulli.
De Moivre and the Doctrine of Chances, 1718, 1738, and 1756.
The Problems of the Duration of Play and the Method of Difference Equations.
References.
Index.