Frequentist Probability - History

History

The frequentist view was arguably foreshadowed by Aristotle, in Rhetoric, when he wrote:

the probable is that which for the most part happens

It was given explicit statement by Robert Leslie Ellis in "On the Foundations of the Theory of Probabilities" read on 14 February 1842, (and much later again in "Remarks on the Fundamental Principles of the Theory of Probabilities"). Antoine Augustin Cournot presented the same conception in 1843, in Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités.

Perhaps the first elaborate and systematic exposition was by John Venn, in The Logic of Chance: An Essay on the Foundations and Province of the Theory of Probability (published editions in 1866, 1876, 1888).

Read more about this topic:  Frequentist Probability

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?
    Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)

    The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    ... that there is no other way,
    That the history of creation proceeds according to
    Stringent laws, and that things
    Do get done in this way, but never the things
    We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
    To see come into being.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)