- The History of Statistics
- Stephen M. Stigler
- Stigler shows how statistics arose from the interplay of mathematical concepts and the needs of several applied sciences including astronomy, geodesy, experimental psychology, genetics, and sociology. His emphasis is upon how, when, and where the methods of probability theory were developed for measuring uncertainty in experimental and observational science, for reducing uncertainty, and as a conceptual framework for quantative studies in the social sciences.
- Hardcover 1986 / Paperback 1990
- Randomness
- Deborah J. Bennett
- From the ancients' first readings of the innards of birds to your neighbor's last bout with the state lottery, humankind has put itself into the hands of chance. This book is aimed at the trouble with trying to learn about probability. A story of the misconceptions and difficulties civilization overcame in progressing toward probabilistic thinking, Randomness is also a skillful account of what makes the science of probability so daunting in our own day.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 1999
- Statistics on the Table
- Stephen M. Stigler
- This lively collection of essays examines statistical ideas with an ironic eye for their essence and what their history can tell us for current disputes. The topics range from seventeenth-century medicine and the circulation of blood, to the cause of the Great Depression and the effect of the California gold discoveries of 1848 upon price levels, to the determinations of the shape of the Earth and the speed of light, to the meter of Virgil's poetry and the prediction of the Second Coming of Christ.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2002