Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Timeline of Statistical Analysis

Timeline of Statistical Analysis - A journey into the history of statistical analysis
17th Century
1654 - Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat were the founders of the theory of probability.
1693 - Edmund Halley discovers the mortality tables statistically for the first time relating death rate to age.

18th Century
1724 - Abraham de Moivre further explores mortality statistics and discoveres the theory of annuities.
1733 - Abraham de Moivre was the first to introduce normal distribution to approximate the binomial distribution in probability which was a mystery till then
1761 - Thomas Bayes was successful in providng Bayes theorem

19th Century
1805 - Adrien-Marie Legendre was the first to introduce the method of least squares for fitting a curve for a given set of observations

20th Century
1933 - Andrey Kolmogorov publishes his book Basic notions of the calculus of probability - an axiomatization of probability based on measure theory
1943 - Kenneth Levenberg designs a method for nonlinear least squares fitting
1953 - Nicholas Metropolis defines the idea of thermodynamic simulated annealing algorithms.
1962 - Donald Marquardt discovers the Levenberg-Marquardt nonlinear least squares fitting algorithm.
1980 - Introduction of Computers in Statistical Analysis which latter lead to development of statistical softwares