@article{93178,
      recid = {1409116},
      author = {Porter, Theodore M.,},
      title = {The rise of statistical thinking, 1820-1900 /},
      number = {93178},
      pages = {xii, 333 pages ;},
      abstract = {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.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1409116},
}