Anders Hald 
A History of Probability and Statistics and Their Applications before 1750 

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From the Reviews of History of Probability and Statistics and
Their Applications before 1750

‘This is a marvelous book . . . Anyone with the slightest
interest in the history of statistics, or in understanding how
modern ideas have developed, will find this an invaluable
resource.’

-Short Book Reviews of ISI

Table of Content

1. The Book and Its Relation to Other Works.

2. A Sketch of the Background in Mathematics and Natural
Philosophy.

3. Early Concepts of Probability and Chance.

4. Cardano and Liber de Ludo Aleae, c. 1565.

5. The Foundation of Probability Theory by Pascal and Fermat in
1654.

6. Huygens and De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae, 1657.

7. John Graunt and the Observations Made upon the Bills of
Mortality, 1662.

8. The Probabilistic Interpretation of Graunt’s Life Table.

9. The Early History of Life Insurance Mathematics.

10. Mathematical Models and Statistical Methods in Astronomy
from Hipparchus to Kepler and Galileo.

11. The Newtonian Revolution in Mathematics and Science.

12. Miscellaneous Contributions Between 1657 and 1708.

13. The Great Leap Forward, 1708 – 1718: A Survey.

14. New Solutions to Old Problems, 1708 – 1718.

15. James Bernoulli and Ars Conjectandi, 1713.

16. Bernoulli’s Theorem.

17. Tests of Significance Based on the Sex Ratio at Birth and
the Binomial Distribution, 1712 – 1713.

18. Montmort and the Essay d’Analyse sur les Jeux de
Hazard, 1708 and 1713.

19. The Problem of Coincidences and the Compound Probability
Theorem.

20. The Problems of the Duration of Play, 1708-1718.

21. Nicholas Bernoulli.

22. De Moivre and the Doctrine of Chances, 1718, 1738,
and 1756.

23. The Problem of the Duration of Play and the Method of
Difference Equations.

24. De Moivre’s Normal Approximation to the Binomial
Distribution, 1733.

25. The Insurance Mathematics of de Moivre and Simpson,
1725-1756.

References.

Index.

About the author

Anders Hald was formerly a Professor of Statistics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.