Origin and Growth of Statistics

The subject is far older than its modern mathematical form suggests, and understanding where it came from explains why it is now indispensable to business and government alike.

Origin in the affairs of the State. The very word statistics is traced to the Latin status, the Italian statista and the German statistik — all connected with the idea of the State. In its earliest form, statistics was literally "the science of the State": ancient and medieval rulers collected data on population, land, wealth, agricultural produce and military strength, chiefly to assess taxes and to raise and maintain armies. India's own tradition here is old and well documented — Kautilya's Arthashastra (roughly the 4th century BCE) describes a systematic census of population, agriculture and economic activity for administration and taxation, and the Ain-i-Akbari of the Mughal period records detailed statistics of land revenue, agriculture and population.

Growth through the theory of probability. From administrative record-keeping, statistics grew into a rigorous discipline when it joined hands with the theory of probability, developed from the 17th century onward through the study of games of chance. Probability gave statistics the tools to move beyond merely describing data that had been collected, to drawing reliable inferences about a whole population from a sample and quantifying the uncertainty in those inferences.

Modern expansion. In the 19th and 20th centuries statistical methods spread far beyond the State into virtually every field — economics, business and commerce, the physical and biological sciences, medicine, psychology, agriculture and industry. The two broad branches recognised today follow directly from this history:

• Descriptive statistics — collecting, organising, summarising and presenting data (the focus of a Class 11 course: averages, dispersion, tables, graphs). …