History of Mathematics in and for the Curriculum
Notes and References (Part 5)
Concerning the History of Statistics.
1. Books
Most general books on the history of mathematics have little or no information about
the history of statistics or probability (apart from references to Pascal, Fermat, Galileo
and Cardano) but there are quite a number of books that deal with the subject area at
various stages in history.
a) The following are a selection of what is available:
David, F. N. (1962)
Games, Gods and Gambling: A history of probability and statistical ideas
New York. Dover Books
Originally published by Griffin in London, this is still a very well-known classic book
on the subject still full of interesting and reliable information. A good book to start
with which can be read by pupils of
MacKenzie, D.A. (1981)
Statistics in Britain 1865 - 1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge
Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press
Donald MacKenzie’s book looks at the development of statistics as a tool for science
from the late 19th and early 20th century. It covers the Eugenics movement,
Darwinism, the origins of Biometrics, the development of Statistical Theory, and the
applications (good and bad) to science and politics.
Ore, O. (1953) Cardano, The Gambling Scholar .
A good story and biography of Girolamo Cardano by the Danish Mathematician
Oystein Ore. Contains a translation of Cardano’s Liber de Ludo Aleae (Book on
Games of Chance).
Pennick, N. (1988) Games of the Gods .
London. Hutchinson
Religious Beliefs, Superstition, Astrology and Divination in may cultures and their
connections to many games of dice and on the board
Rabinowitz, N.L. (1973)
Probability and Statistical Inference in Ancient and Mediaeval Jewish Literature
Toronto
University of Toronto Press
There were many ideas about probability before the 17th century, when many people
think it was founded by Pascal and Fermat. There are ancient sources in Arab and
Jewish traditions on the fairness of division of inheritances, and the problems of
making the right judgement in legal cases.
© Leo Rogers.
Created June 2009
Leo.Rogers@education.ox.ac.uk
Oxford University
1
History of Mathematics in and for the Curriculum
b) Books for more detailed research and the social contexts of ideas:
Lorraine Daston (1988)
Classical Probability in the Enlightenment
Princeton University Press
Hacking, I. (1990) The Taming of Chance
Cambridge.
C.U.P.
Hacking, I. (2007) (second edition) The Emergence of Probability
Cambridge. C.U.P.
Both of Ian Hacking’s books are more academic and full of interesting social
background to the development of probability and statistical inference. They explore
the motivations for gathering information and the need for finding out about events
(the occurrence of sickness, criminality, mortality, shipwrecks, and so on) and wealth
of nations (counting quantities of materials, money, size of armies etc.). These were
gradually organised into collections of information, but it was not until special forms
of representation were used that it was possible to make any useful predictions. Each
chapter in these books has a descriptive introduction and it is possible to read
individual chapters if you are interested in particular topics.
Hald, A. (2003) A History of Probability and Statistics and their Applications Before
1750 . New York. Wiley
Stigler, S.M. (1986)
The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
2. Original Texts
Augustus De Moivre
The Doctrine of Chances or, A Method of Calculating the Probabilities of Events in
Play
This is an exact reproduction of the second edition of 1738 with a new table of
analytic contents and index added by the editors.
London. Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. 1967
Pearson, E.S. and Kendall, M.G. (1970)
Studies in the History of Statistics and Probability.
London
Griffin
A series of original papers selected and edited by Pearson and Kendall, particularly
Pearson’s lectures on the History of Statistics. This volume also contains essays by
others including Bayes and Daniel Bernouilli.
© Leo Rogers.
Created June 2009
Leo.Rogers@education.ox.ac.uk
Oxford University
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History of Mathematics in and for the Curriculum
3. Some Books for the Classroom
Jenkins, G.W. & Slack J.L. (1979) Classroom Experiments with Dice .
St Albans. Tarquin Publications
Woods, G. Symmetry Dice . St Albans. Tarquin Publications
Benson, S. (2005)
Ways to think about Mathematics:Activities and Investigations for Grade 6 .
California. Corwin Press.
This is a useful book with many examples of activities. There are sections about
probability and binomial coefficients.
4. Web Resources for Statistics
My recent piece on the NRICH website is:
‘From a Random World to a Rational Universe’
http://nrich.maths.org/public/viewer.php?obj_id=6120
and linked with this is ‘Randomness and Brownian Motion’
http://nrich.maths.org/public/viewer.php?obj_id=6127
The MacTutor Website has a Statistics Index:
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/HistTopics/Statistics.html
Amongst a mine of information and links to other sites is a delightful tongue-in-cheek
version of the Hiawatha poem by Longfellow called “Hiawatha Designs and
Experiment.” There is also a link to the interesting theory of Leonard J. Savage on
‘Subjective Probability’
Other Sites:
Another good site is from the University of York:
Materials in the History of Statistics.
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/welcome.htm
Many links, one of which leads us to Southampton
University of Southampton
Figures from the History of Probability and Statistics
http://www.economics.soton.ac.uk/staff/aldrich/Figures.htm
This site carries a great deal of information and is well worth exploring, even though
it duplicates some of the material in the sites above. The short biographies at the top
of the first page are very useful.
Sadly, even though it appears to have been updated in May 2009, a number of the
links to not seem to work.
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Statistics
http://www.stat.ucla.edu/history/
A mine of information of many different aspects: Portraits, articles, copies and
translations of original works.
© Leo Rogers.
Created June 2009
Leo.Rogers@education.ox.ac.uk
Oxford University
3
History of Mathematics in and for the Curriculum
Sources in the History of Statistics and Probability
http://www.morris.umn.edu/~sungurea/introstat/history/indexhistory.shtml
This site has a series of articles on famous individuals from the late 19th and 20th
century onward: e.g. Francis Galton, Florence Nightingale, Karl Pearson, and others
who are well known in the subject.
A Short History of Probability and Statistics
http://www.leidenuniv.nl/fsw/verduin/stathist/stathist.htm
From Leiden University - all in English.
There is a translation of Galileo’s original discussion of dice
© Leo Rogers.
Created June 2009
Leo.Rogers@education.ox.ac.uk
Oxford University
4