A random sampling of events that have marked the history of probability, statistics, and our understanding of chance.

2750 B.C. Earliest known 6-sided die, found in Mesopotamia
				2700-1700 B.C. Games of chance that resemble modern board games, from ancient Babylonia, Knossos and Egypt
850 B.C. Homer's Iliad contains the first mention of a lottery used to determine fate randomly
				450 B.C. Greek atomist, Leucippus, declares, "Nothing happens at random; everything happens out of reason and by necessity."
6 A.D. The verses of the I Ching, a Chinese oracle involving devices of chance, are put in their present form
				1220-1250 In his poem De vetula, Richard de Fournival writes the first correct enumerateion of equiprobable tosses of 3 dice
1564 The Book on Games of Chance by Girolamo Cardona is the first evidence of the mathematical study of chance
				1613-1623 Galileo demonstrates a clear understanding of random sequences in his essay Thoughts About Dice Games
1654 The correspondence of Pascal and Fermat is considered the beginning of the serious study of probability
				1643 Hobbes and The Bishop of Derry debate free will vs. determinism; Hobbes declares that it is only ignorance of causes that causes men to attribute events to chance
1756 Abraham de Moivre pens the first modern probability book
				1777 Bernoulli proposes a probability curve to describe errors in astronomical measurement
1778 Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, discovers the normal curve for the distribution of random errors, the "bell curve"
				1808-1809 Robert Adrian and Carl Fredrich Gauss each develop the bell curve independently
1810 Laplace presents his Central Limit Theorem to the Academy in Paris
				1873-1874 Sir Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin) designs the quincunx
1900 Pearson publishes his influential chi-square goodness-of-fit test
				1908 Gosset describes Student's t, to provide a statistical method for smaller sample sizes
1927 The first table of random digits, Tippet's Random Sampling Numbers, is published
				1950-1965 Several studies are published, attempting to prove or disprove that the distributions of the digits of irrational numbers, such as pi and e, are random
1979 Bradley Efron introduces the resampling technique known as bootstrapping
				1989 The Chudnovskys expand pi to over a billion digits and use a sophisticated random walk test to suggest that these digits are indeed random
1990 The now-infamous Monty Hall Problem is posed to Marilyn vos Savant in the Parade column "Ask Marilyn"

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History of Mathematics Archive

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