The Oxford English etymological dictionary defines statistics as follows:
statistics - first applied to the political science concerned with the facts of a state or community XVIII; all derived immediately from German statistisch adj., statistik sb.; whence statistician XIX.
Statistics is concerned with exploring, summarising, and making inferences about the state of complex systems, for example, the state of a nation (official statistics), the state of peoples' health (medical and health statistics), the state of the environment (environmental statistics), etc.
Table 1.1 gives a brief summary of some of the earlier key developments in statistics and probability in Europe over the last five centuries. The initial development of statistics in the 16th and 17th centuries was motivated by the need to make sense of the large amount of data collected by population surveys in the emerging European nation states. Then, in the 18th century, the mathematical foundations were improved significantly by breakthroughs in the theory of probability inspired by games of chance (gambling). In the 19th century, statistics started to be used to make sense of the wealth of new scientific data. Finally, in the 20th century, modern statistics has emerged and has continued to progress rapidly throughout the whole century. The development of electronic computers in the 1950s and ever increasing amounts of available data have both played key roles in driving statistics forwards. For a more complete historical review of statistics refer to the books by David (1962), Johnson and Kotz (1998) and Kotz and Johnson (1993).
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