The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820-1900

About this book

Emphasizing the debt of science to nonspecialist intellectuals Theodore Porter describes in detail the nineteenth-century background that produced the burst of modern statistical innovation of the early 1900s. Statistics arose as a study of society--the science of the statist--and the pioneering statistical physicists and biologists Maxwell Boltzmann and Galton each introduced statistical models by pointing to analogies between his discipline and social science.