timeline

people and readings

1600

• 1623-1662 Pascal
• 1620-1674 Graunt
• 1629-1695 Huygens
• 1642-1727 Newton
• 1646-1716 Leibniz
• 1655-1705 Jacob Bernoulli (of the distribution; see also family)
• 1657 Huygens's De radiociniis in ludo aleae
• 1663 Graunt's Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality
• 1671 De Witt's 1st (unimplemented) mathematical annuity scheme, following Huygens
• 1687 Newton's Principia
• 1693 Edmund Halley's mortality table

1700

• 1701-1761 Thomas Bayes
• 1707-1783 Euler
• 1710 Arbuthnot's An Argument for Divine Providence Taken from the Constant Regularity Observed in the Birth of Both Sexes
• 1718 De Moivre's Doctrine of Chances
• 1725 De Moivre's Treatise of Annuities
• 1734 Founding of University of Göttingen
• 1749–1827 Laplace
• 1766-1834 Malthus
• 1768-1830 Fourier
• 1770 first usage of "statistics...the political arrangement of all the modern states of the known world."
• 1777-1855 Gauss
• 1781-1840 Poisson
• 1792-1793 Condorcet
• 1794 Founding of École Polytechnique
• 1796-1874 Quetelet

1800

• 1805 Legendre on least squares for orbits of comets
• 1809 Gauss on least squares for "motion of the celestial bodies...around the Sun"
• 1812 Poisson Equation
• 1822 Fourier's Analytic Theory of Heat
• 1822-1884 Gregor Mendel
• 1822-1911 Galton
• 1824-1880 Broca
• 1831 founding of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
• 1834 founding of the Statistical Society of London -> Royal Statistical Scociety
• 1835 Quetelet's Treatise on Man, book: "Essay on Social Physics: Man and the Development of his Faculties,"
• 1837 Transactions of the Statistical Society of London
• 1837 Poisson coins the phrase "la loi des grands nombres" ("The law of large numbers")
• 1842 British government abandons Babbage's Difference Engine
• 1845 Quetelet's "On Man" translated into English
• 1845 Quetelet's "Theory of Probabilities as applied to the Moral and Political Sciences"
• 1857-1936 Karl Pearson
• 1858-1917 Durkheim
• 1858-1869 Florence Nightingale's data visualizations
• 1859 Darwin's Origin of Species
• 1863-1945 Charles Spearman (Rank correlation: 1904)
• 1866 Publication of Mendel's Experiments on Plant Hybridization
• 1869 Minard's Napoleon graph (Paris, November 20, 1869)
• 1871-1951 Udny Yule, Scottish statistician (multivariate regression: 1985)
• 1875-1941 Henri Lebesgue
• 1876-1937 Student, aka William Sealy Gosset
• 1877 Galton's On typical laws of heredity
• 1885 Galton's Regression towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Science presented, September 10
• 1888 Galton's “Co-relations and their Measurement, chiefly from Anthropometric Data.” December 5
• 1890-1962 Ronald A Fisher
• 1894-1981 Jerzy Neyman
• 1895-1980 Egon Pearson
• 1895 Yule's "On the Correlation of Total Pauperism with Proportion of Out-relief"
• 1899 Yule's "An investigation into the causes of changes in pauperism in England, chiefly during the last two intercensal decades (Part I.)."

1900

• 1902-1950 Abraham Wald
• 1903-1987 Andrey Kolmogorov
• 1911 Pearson's Grammar of Science, 3rd edition, discusses correlations
• 1915-2000 Tukey
• 1916-2001 Shannon
• 1925 first edition of Fisher's Statistical Methods for Research Workers
• 1927-2011 John McCarthy
• 1932-1972 Tuskegee, led to research ethics standardizations
• 1936 Church and Turing
• 1939-07-25 Polish cryptologists disclose the bombe to French and British
• 1939-09-01 Outbreak of WWII
• 1943 McCulloch-Pitts
• 1948 First randomized controlled trial
• 1950 Turing Test
• 1952 Claude Shannon's Theseus (machine learning mouse)
• 1956 Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence meeting (proposed in 1955)
• 1961-01-17 President Dwight D. Eisenhower warns U.S. citizens about the "military–industrial complex" in his farewell address.
• 1962 Tukey's FoDA
• 1964 ALPAC report in US (cf. AI Winter, US)
• 1965 Moore's law
• 1974 Lighthill Debate (cf. AI Winter, UK)
• 1981 Gould's Mismeasure of Man (updated 1996)
• 1993 Desrosiers's Politics of Large Numbers (In class we're following the 2002 translation)

2000

• 2008 Igo's Averaged american
• 2015 Deep plays Atari
• 2015 Bouk's How our days became numbered