Who Discovered Statistics and Why

John Graunt, was native of London. He owned his own store and could claim an appreciation for numbers and sound recordkeeping. Through his investigation of the births and deaths of his fellow citizens is when STATISTICS was discovered.

It all started when he was reading the perish publication which listed the account of all births, deaths and christenings. He would categorize the cause of deaths, from ages (ex: infants, middle ages, elderly) and the cause of death (ex: fever, small pox, stillborn) to see if there were any correlation.

Through his investigation, he discovered that more boys than girls were born, he also discovered that women tended to live longer than men (even in those days), also few people were dying from starvation, and lastly deaths from disease did not vary greatly from year to year. Eventhough through his investigation he did not find a true correlation between the deaths and the ages, he did discover Statistics.

His investigation dealt with quantitative characteristics of entire population, he introduced the concept of statistical samples and actuarial tables that would lay the foundation for the insurance industry and lastly he put the results into a table of mortality which has remained the pattern for all subsequent tables.

From reading, Statistics Without Tears, it described how statistical thinking has been a part of history for a very long time. From the earliest times, kings and government have been collecting statistics about the population and resources of their states (an example is the Domesday Book compiled by William the Conquer). Another book that had data about how many people they had available to build pyramids or fight wars and how much wealth they could conceivably squeeze out of them in taxation was noted in the Old Testament. Today, government generates a large amount of statistics, and as I discussed in today’s jobs statistics have become a part of many individuals jobs.

Statistics is a scientific tool for making inferences, predictions, or decisions concerning a population of measurements based upon information contained in a sample. The purpose of sampling is to make an inference about a much larger set of measurements called the population. A population is the set of all measurement of interest to the sample collector.

There are two ways of representing descriptive statistics: numerical and pictorial. As for numerical. An example of a numerical statistics was used in the book titled, Statistics, if you are offered a purchase price of $1 for an automobile, the price of the second automobile will be a major consideration (its price could be 1,000,000 or 1,000), and thus, the average - or mean- of the two prices will be the important statistics.

The second way is the pictorial statistics and the book titled, Statistics, states that showing data in the form of a graphic can make complex and confusing information appear more simple and straightforward. They can be shown as bar charts, dot plots, and pie charts.

Having math anxiety, I really did not want to take another math class and after finding out that statistics was the math class I needed to take just made matters worse. I heard so many horror stories about Statistics, but now after spending the time to research this topic, I have found this topic not only interesting but I honestly am thinking of taking the class next semester.