This lively collection of essays examines in witty detail the history of some of the concepts involved in bringing statistical argument "to the table," and some of the pitfalls that have been encountered. The topics range from seventeenth-century medicine and the circulation of blood, to the cause of the Great Depression and the effect of the California gold discoveries of 1848 upon price levels, to the determinations of the shape of the Earth and the speed of light, to the meter of Virgil's poetry and the prediction of the Second Coming of Christ. The title essay tells how the statistician Karl Pearson came to issue the challenge to put "statistics on the table" to the economists Marshall, Keynes, and Pigou in 1911. The 1911 dispute involved the effect of parental alcoholism upon children, but the challenge is general and timeless: important arguments require evidence, and quantitative evidence requires statistical evaluation. Some essays examine deep and subtle statistical ideas such as the aggregation and regression paradoxes; others tell of the origin of the Average Man and the evaluation of fingerprints as a forerunner of the use of DNA in forensic science. Several of the essays are entirely nontechnical; all examine statistical ideas with an ironic eye for their essence and what their history can tell us about current disputes.

저자 : 스티븐 스티글러 (Stephen M. Stigler)
1941년 미국 미네소타 주 미니애폴리스에서 태어났다. 1982년도 노벨 경제학상 수상자인 조지 스티글러의 아들이기도 하다. 칼턴 칼리지를 거쳐 캘리포니아 대학교에서 통계학 박사학위를 받았다. 1960년대 후반부터 로버스트 추정, 점근 이론 등 통계학 여러 분야에서 논문을 발표했다. 2005년 현재 시카고 대학 통계학과 교수이자 국제통계협회 회장을 맡고 있다. 지은 책으로 <통계학의 역사>, <탁자 위의 통계학> 등이 있다.