The rise of statistical thinking, 1820-1900 / Theodore M. Porter.
Porter, Theodore M., 1953- author.
1986
QA276.15 .P67 1986 (Mapit)
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Title The rise of statistical thinking, 1820-1900 / Theodore M. Porter.
Author Porter, Theodore M., 1953- author.
ISBN 0691084165 (alk. paper)
9780691084169 (alk. paper)
069102409X
9780691024097
Published Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 1986.
Language English
Description xii, 333 pages ; 25 cm
Call Number QA276.15 .P67 1986
Alternate Call Number 31.73
70.03
MA211
Universal Decimal Classification 512.76(091
Dewey Decimal Classification 519.5/09
Summary Not since the invention of the calculus, if ever, has a new field of mathematics found such extensive application as statistics in the twentieth-century. This book presents thoroughly and lucidly the diverse nineteenth-century origins of the mathematical tool of our day. 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. He shows that the natural and social sciences were surprisingly interdependent. 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. The author also examines significant philosophical issues raised by the development of statistics in the 1800s. For a time, the evident success of statistical social science was held to be inconsistent with human free will. Gradually a consensus was developed that the need for statistical methods arose from the diversity of phenomena, which precluded explanation in detail. Debates concerning the nature of statistical knowledge were central to the new indeterminism that began to emerge at the end of the century. -- from back cover.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
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The social calculus : Statistics as a social science : The politics of political arithmetic ; The numbers of a dynamic society
The laws that govern chaos : Quetelet and the numerical regularities of society ; Liberal politics and statistical laws
From nature's urn to the insurance office
The supreme law of unreason : The errors of art and nature : Quetelet: error and variation
Social law and natural science : Molecules and social physics ; Galton and the reality of variation
The science of uncertainty : Statistical law and human freedom : The opponents of statistics ; Statistics and free will ; The science of diversity ; Statistik: between nature and history
Time's arrow and statistical uncertainty in physics and philosophy : Buckle's laws and Maxwell's demon ; Boltzmann, statistics, and irreversibility ; Pierce's rejection of necessity
Polymathy and discipline : The mathematics of statistics : Lexi's index of dispersion ; Edgeworth: mathematics and economics
The roots of biometrical statistics : Galton's biometrical analogies ; Regression and correlation ; Pearson and mathematical biometry.

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