---
title: "History of statistics"
chunk: 5/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:26.751121+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The first statistical bodies were established in the early 19th century. The Royal Statistical Society was founded in 1834 and Florence Nightingale, its first female member, pioneered the application of statistical analysis to health problems for the furtherance of epidemiological understanding and public health practice. However, the methods then used would not be considered as modern statistics today.
The Oxford scholar Francis Ysidro Edgeworth's book, Metretike: or The Method of Measuring Probability and Utility (1887) dealt with probability as the basis of inductive reasoning, and his later works focused on the 'philosophy of chance'. His first paper on statistics (1883) explored the law of error (normal distribution), and his Methods of Statistics (1885) introduced an early version of the t distribution, the Edgeworth expansion, the Edgeworth series, the method of variate transformation and the asymptotic theory of maximum likelihood estimates.
The Norwegian Anders Nicolai Kiær introduced the concept of stratified sampling in 1895. Arthur Lyon Bowley introduced new methods of data sampling in 1906 when working on social statistics. Although statistical surveys of social conditions had started with Charles Booth's "Life and Labour of the People in London" (1889–1903) and Seebohm Rowntree's "Poverty, A Study of Town Life" (1901), Bowley's key innovation consisted of the use of random sampling techniques. His efforts culminated in his New Survey of London Life and Labour.
Francis Galton is credited as one of the principal founders of statistical theory. His contributions to the field included introducing the concepts of standard deviation, correlation,  regression and the application of these methods to the study of the variety of human characteristics – height, weight, eyelash length among others. He found that many of these could be fitted to a normal curve distribution.
Galton submitted a paper to Nature in 1907 on the usefulness of the median. He examined the accuracy of 787 guesses of the weight of an ox at a country fair. The actual weight was 1208 pounds: the median guess was 1198. The guesses were markedly non-normally distributed (cf. Wisdom of the Crowd).