The Britannica Guide to Statistics and Probability

Britannica Educational Publishing, Erik Gregersen

• Editore: Britannica Educational Publishing
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781615302284
• Argomento: Matemáticas
• Categoria: Probabilidad y estadística

By observing patterns and repeated behaviors, mathematicians have devised calculations to significantly reduce human potential for error. This volume introduces the historical and mathematical basis of statistics and probability as well as their application to everyday situations. Readers will also meet the prominent thinkers who advanced the field and established a numerical basis for prediction.

CHAPTER 1
HISTORY OF STATISTICS AND PROBABILITY

Statistics and probability are the branches of mathematics concerned with the laws governing random events, including the collection, analysis, interpretation, and display of numerical data. Probability has its origin in the study of gambling and insurance in the 17th century, and it is now an indispensable tool of both social and natural sciences. Statistics may be said to have its origin in census counts taken thousands of years ago. As a distinct scientific discipline, however, it was developed in the early 19th century as the study of populations, economies, and moral actions and later in that century as the mathematical tool for analyzing such numbers.

EARLY PROBABILITY

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It is astounding that for a subject that has altered how humanity views nature and society, probability had its beginnings in frivolous gambling. How much should you bet on the turn of a card? An entirely new branch of mathematics developed from such questions.

GAMES OF CHANCE

The modern mathematics of chance is usually dated to a correspondence between the French mathematicians Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal in 1654. Their inspiration came from a problem about games of chance, proposed by a remarkably philosophical gambler, the chevalier de Méré. De Méré inquired about the proper division of the stakes when a game of chance is interrupted. Suppose two players, A and B, are playing a three-point game, each having wagered 32 pistoles, and are interrupted after A has two points and B has one. How much should each receive?

Blaise Pascal invented the syringe and created the hydraulic press, an instrument based upon the principle that became known as Pascal’s law. Boyer/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

Fermat and Pascal proposed somewhat different solutions, but they agreed about the numerical answer. Each undertook to define a set of equal or symmetrical cases, then to answer the problem by comparing the number for A with that for B. Fermat, however, gave his answer in terms of the chances, or probabilities. He reasoned that two more games would suffice in any case to determine a victory. There are four possible outcomes, each equally likely in a fair game of chance. A might win twice, AA; or first A then B might win; or B then A; or BB. Of these four sequences, only the last would result in a victory for B. Thus, the odds for A are 3:1, implying a distribution of 48 pistoles for A and 16 pistoles for B.

Pascal thought Fermat’s solution unwieldy, and he proposed to solve the problem not in terms of chances but in terms of the quantity now called “expectation.” Suppose B had already won the next round. In that case, the positions of A and B would be equal, each having won two games, and each would be entitled to 32 pistoles. A should receive his portion in any case. B’s 32, by contrast, depend on the assumption that he had won the first round. This first round can now be treated as a fair game for this stake of 32 pistoles, so that each player has an expectation of 16. Hence A’s lot is 32 + 16, or 48, and B’s is just 16.

Games of chance such as this one provided model problems for the theory of chances during its early period, and indeed they remain staples of the textbooks. A posthumous work of 1665 by Pascal on the “arithmetic triangle” now linked to his name showed how to calculate numbers of combinations and how to group them to solve elementary gambling problems. Fermat and Pascal were not the first to give mathematical solutions to problems such as these. More than a century earlier, the Italian mathematician, physician, and gambler Girolamo Cardano calculated odds for games of luck by counting up equally probable cases. His little book, however, was not published until 1663, by which time the elements of the theory of chances were already well known to mathematicians in Europe. It will never be known what would have happened had Cardano published in the 1520s. It cannot be assumed that probability theory would have taken off in the 16th century. When it began to flourish, it did so in the context of the “new science” of the 17th-century scientific revolution, when the use of calculation to solve tricky problems had gained a new credibility. Cardano, moreover, had no great faith in his own calculations of gambling odds, since he believed also in luck, particularly in his own. In the Renaissance world of monstrosities, marvels, and similitudes, chance—allied to fate—was not readily naturalized, and sober calculation had its limits.

RISKS, EXPECTATIONS, AND FAIR CONTRACTS

In the 17th century, Pascal’s strategy for solving problems of chance became the standard. It was, for example, used by the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens in his short treatise on games of chance, published in 1657. Huygens refused to define equality of chances as a fundamental presumption of a fair game but derived it instead from what he saw as a more basic notion of an equal exchange. Most questions of probability in the 17th century were solved, as Pascal solved his, by redefining the problem in terms of a series of games in which all players have equal expectations. The new theory of chances was not, in fact, simply about gambling but also about the legal notion of a fair contract. A fair contract implied equality of expectations, which served as the fundamental notion in these calculations. Measures of chance or probability were derived secondarily from these expectations.

Probability was tied up with questions of law and exchange in one other crucial respect. Chance and risk, in aleatory contracts, provided a justification for lending at interest, and hence a way of avoiding Christian prohibitions against usury. Lenders, the argument went, were like investors; having shared the risk, they deserved also to share in the gain. For this reason, ideas of chance had already been incorporated in a loose, largely nonmathematical way into theories of banking and marine insurance. From about 1670, initially in the Netherlands, probability began to be used to determine the proper rates at which to sell annuities. Jan de Wit, leader of the Netherlands from 1653 to 1672, corresponded in the 1660s with Huygens, and eventually he published a small treatise on the subject of annuities in 1671.

Annuities in early modern Europe were often issued by states to raise money, especially in times of war. They were generally sold according to a simple formula such as “seven years purchase,” meaning that the annual payment to the annuitant, promised until the time of his or her death, would be one-seventh of the principal. This formula took no account of age at the time the annuity was purchased. Wit lacked data on mortality rates at different ages, but he understood that the proper charge for an annuity depended on the number of years that the purchaser could be expected to live and on the presumed rate of interest. Despite his efforts and those of other mathematicians, it remained rare even in the 18th century for rulers to pay much heed to such quantitative considerations. Life insurance, too, was connected only loosely to probability calculations and mortality records, though statistical data on death became increasingly available in the course of the 18th century. The first insurance society to price its policies on the basis of probability calculations was the Equitable, founded in London in 1762.

PROBABILITY AS THE LOGIC OF UNCERTAINTY

The English clergyman Joseph Butler, in his very influential Analogy of Religion (1736), called probability “the very guide of life.” The phrase did not refer to mathematical calculation, however, but merely to the judgments made where rational demonstration is impossible. The word probability was used in relation to the mathematics of chance in 1662 in the Logic of Port-Royal, written by Pascal’s fellow Jansenists, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole. But from medieval times to the 18th century and even into the 19th, a probable belief was most often merely one that seemed plausible, came on good authority, or was worthy of approval. Probability, in this sense, was emphasized in England and France from the late 17th century as an answer to skepticism. Man may not be able to attain perfect knowledge but can know enough to make decisions about the problems of daily life. The new experimental natural philosophy of the later 17th century was associated with this more modest ambition, one that did not insist on logical proof.

Almost from the beginning, however, the new mathematics of chance was invoked to suggest that decisions could after all be made more rigorous. Pascal invoked it in the most famous chapter of his Pensées, “Of the Necessity of the Wager,” in relation to the most important decision of all, whether to accept the Christian faith. One cannot know of God’s existence with absolute certainty; there is no alternative but to bet (“il faut parier”). Perhaps, he supposed, the unbeliever can be persuaded by consideration of self-interest. If there is a God (Pascal assumed he must be the Christian God), to believe in him offers the prospect of an infinite reward for infinite time. However small the probability, provided only that it be finite, the mathematical expectation of this wager is infinite. For so great a benefit, one sacrifices rather little, perhaps a few paltry pleasures during one’s brief life on Earth. It seemed plain which was the more reasonable choice.

The link between the doctrine of chance and religion remained an important one through much of the 18th century, especially in Britain. Another argument for belief in God relied on a probabilistic natural theology. The classic instance is a paper read by John Arbuthnot to the Royal Society of London in 1710 and published in its Philosophical Transactions in 1712. Arbuthnot presented there a table of christenings in London from 1629 to 1710. He observed that in every year there was a slight excess of male over female births. The proportion, approximately 14 boys for every 13 girls, was perfectly calculated, given the greater dangers to which young men are exposed in their search for food, to bring the sexes to an equality of numbers at the age of marriage. Could this excellent result have been produced by chance alone? Arbuthnot thought not, and he deployed a probability calculation to demonstrate the point. The probability that male births would by accident exceed female ones in 82 consecutive years is (0.5)⁸². Considering further that this excess is found all over the world, he said, and within fixed limits of variation, the chance becomes almost infinitely small. This argument for the overwhelming probability of Divine Providence was repeated by many—and refined by a few. The Dutch natural philosopher Willem’s Gravesande incorporated the limits of variation of these birth ratios into his mathematics and so attained a still more decisive vindication of Providence over chance. Nicolas Bernoulli, from the famous Swiss mathematical family, gave a more skeptical view. If the underlying probability of a male birth was assumed to be 0.5169 rather than 0.5, the data were quite in accord with probability theory. That is, no Providential direction was required.

Apart from natural theology, probability came to be seen during the 18th-century Enlightenment as a mathematical version of sound reasoning. In 1677 the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz imagined a utopian world in which disagreements would be met by this challenge: “Let us calculate, sir.” The French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace, in the early 19th century, called probability “good sense reduced to calculation.” This ambition, bold enough, was not quite so scientific as it may first appear. For there were some cases where a straightforward application of probability mathematics led to results that seemed to defy rationality. One example, proposed by Nicolas Bernoulli and made famous as the St. Petersburg paradox, involved a bet with an exponentially increasing payoff. A fair coin is to be tossed until the first time it comes up heads. If it comes up heads on the first toss, the payment is 2 ducats; if the first time it comes up heads is on the second toss, 4 ducats; and if on the nth toss, 2ⁿ ducats. The mathematical expectation of this game is infinite, but no sensible person would pay a very large sum for the privilege of receiving the payoff from it. The disaccord between calculation and reasonableness created a problem, addressed by generations of mathematicians. Prominent among them was Nicolas’s cousin Daniel Bernoulli, whose solution depended on the idea that a ducat added to the wealth of a rich man benefits him much less than it does a poor man (a concept now known as decreasing marginal utility).

Pierre Simon de Laplace demonstrated the usefulness of probability for interpreting scientific data. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Probability arguments figured also in more practical discussions, such as debates during the 1750s and ’60s about the rationality of smallpox inoculation. Smallpox was at this time widespread and deadly, infecting most and carrying off perhaps one in seven Europeans. Inoculation in these days involved the actual transmission of smallpox, not the cowpox vaccines developed in the 1790s by the English surgeon Edward Jenner, and was itself moderately risky. Was it rational to accept a small probability of an almost immediate death to greatly reduce a large probability of death by smallpox in the indefinite future? Calculations of mathematical expectation, as by Daniel Bernoulli, unambiguously led to a favourable answer. But some disagreed, most famously the eminent mathematician and perpetual thorn in the flesh of probability theorists, the French mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. One might, he argued, reasonably prefer a greater assurance of surviving in the near term to improved prospects late in life.

THE PROBABILITY OF CAUSES

Many 18th-century ambitions for probability theory, including Arbuthnot’s, involved reasoning from effects to causes. Jakob Bernoulli, uncle of Nicolas and Daniel, formulated and proved a law of large numbers to give formal structure to such reasoning. This was published in 1713 from a manuscript, the Ars conjectandi, left behind at his death in 1705. There he showed that the observed proportion of, say, tosses of heads or of male births will converge as the number of trials increases to the true probability p, supposing that it is uniform. His theorem was designed to give assurance that when p is not known in advance, it can properly be inferred by someone with sufficient experience. He thought of disease and the weather as in some way like drawings from an urn. At bottom they are deterministic, but because one cannot know the causes in sufficient detail, one must be content to investigate the probabilities of events under specified conditions.

The English physician and philosopher David Hartley announced in his Observations on Man (1749) that a certain “ingenious Friend” had shown him a solution of the “inverse problem” of reasoning from the occurrence of an event p times and its failure q times to the “original Ratio” of causes. But Hartley named no names, and the first publication of the formula he promised occurred in 1763 in a posthumous paper of Thomas Bayes, communicated to the Royal Society by the British philosopher Richard Price. This has come to be known as Bayes’s theorem. But it was the French, especially Laplace, who put the theorem to work as a calculus of induction, and it appears that Laplace’s publication of the same mathematical result in 1774 was entirely independent. The result was perhaps more consequential in theory than in practice. An exemplary application was Laplace’s probability that the sun will come up tomorrow, based on 6,000 years or so of experience in which it has come up every day.

Laplace and his more politically engaged fellow mathematicians, most notably Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, hoped to make probability into the foundation of the moral sciences. This took the form principally of judicial and electoral probabilities, addressing thereby some of the central concerns of the Enlightenment philosophers and critics. Justice and elections were, for the French mathematicians, formally similar. In each, a crucial question was how to raise the probability that a jury or an electorate would decide correctly. One element involved testimonies, a classic topic of probability theory. In 1699 the British mathematician John Craig used probability to vindicate the truth of scripture and, more idiosyncratically, to forecast the end of time, when, because of the gradual attrition of truth through successive testimonies, the Christian religion would become no longer probable. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, more skeptically, argued in probabilistic but nonmathematical language beginning in 1748 that the testimonies supporting miracles were automatically suspect, deriving as they generally did from uneducated persons, lovers of the marvelous. Miracles, moreover, being violations of laws of nature, had such a low a priori probability that even excellent testimony could not make them probable. Condorcet also wrote on the probability of miracles, or at least faits extraordinaires, to the end of subduing the irrational. But he took a more sustained interest in testimonies at trials, proposing to weigh the credibility of the statements of any particular witness by considering the proportion of times that he had told the truth in the past, and then use inverse probabilities to combine the testimonies of several witnesses.

Laplace and Condorcet applied probability also to judgments. In contrast to English juries, French juries voted whether to convict or acquit without formal deliberations. The probabilists began by supposing that the jurors were independent and that each had a probability p greater than ½ of reaching a true verdict. There would be no injustice, Condorcet argued, in exposing innocent defendants to a risk of conviction equal to risk...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: History of Statistics and Probability
• Chapter 2: Probability Theory
• Chapter 3: Statistics
• Chapter 4: Game Theory
• Chapter 5: Combinatorics
• Chapter 6: Biographies
• Chapter 7: Special Topics
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index