Writing Update: History of Probability and Statistics in an Era When Britain Ruled the Seas

Quite the contrast with yesterday’s dreadful England performance!

I’ve been immersed in writing my History of Probability and Statistics book, written for a wider audience interested in the ideas that shaped the course of science. The story begins at the court of Louis XIV, where gamblers experimented with early notions of probability alongside emerging Enlightenment ideas about knowledge and uncertainty.

From there, the narrative moves through the first applications of statistical methods in astronomy, maritime navigation, military planning, and industrial practice. It follows the development of the core probability distributions and the mathematicians who discovered them, then continues into the early twentieth century foundations of statistical mechanics, quantum physics, and modern statistical inference.

Here is a detail I enjoyed revisiting. England’s population crossed ten million around the 1811 census. Thomas Malthus published demographic tables showing the rise, drawing on births, deaths, and parish records. It is a reminder of how early statistical thinking grew out of practical record keeping.

The image below shows John Harrison and the Royal George at Deptford, symbols of Britain’s eighteenth century maritime precision. The Longitude Act of 1714 offered a major financial prize for a reliable method of determining longitude at sea, and Harrison’s marine chronometers became the breakthrough that finally solved the problem.

Quite the contrast with yesterday’s dreadful England performance!

More updates soon as the manuscript continues to take shape. Images are in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.