General introduction
As I was wondering about the first appearance of statistical
goodies such as the standard deviation and the correlation (Pearson and
Spearman) I got the idea for a list of events and dates.
A lot of
(biographical) ground has already been covered by several other web sites
on the history of mathematics (see WWW sites). In
stead of duplicating all this information, I will refer to these sites
whenever this seems appropriate.
Several factors seem to hamper the
writing of a simple history of scientific developments.
- First there is Stiglers Law of Eponymy (1980) which states that no
scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Publication of
discoveries was slow (Fermat, Gauss, Newton), was done posthumously (Bayes,
Bernoulli, Cardano, Galilei) or never happened at all (again Gauss
according to his 19 page scientific diary).
It can be argued that a discovery has to have a certain level of impact in
the scientific community in order to count as relevant, which would make
Legendres publication on the Method of Least Squares in 1805 more important
than the fact that Gauss had discovered the same method years earlier, but
omitted to publish this finding.
Another practice that was used sometimes, was to claim a discovery, when
only a partial result had been obtained, by either publishing incomplete
results, or results without indicating how they were obtained or by hinting
at what had allready been achieved. This would deter others to work on
that specific problem and left the claimant with more time to polish his
solution of the problem, if he succeeded at all.
- Secondly hardly any of the discoveries was baptized by its discoverer,
let alone under the name we now know it by. This leads to the use of a lot
of anachronistic sentences, such as Jacob Bernoulli proves the binomium
of Newton and develops the (weak) law of large numbers in order to
improve readability of this text.
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