# Probability

### 1722

See Ian Hacking's The Emergence of Probability and James Franklin's The Science of Conjecture for histories of the early development of the very concept of mathematical probability. The theory of errors may be traced back to Roger Cotes's Opera Miscellanea (posthumous, 1722), but a memoir prepared by Thomas Simpson in 1755 (printed 1756) first applied the theory to the discussion of errors of observation.

### 1755

See Ian Hacking's The Emergence of Probability and James Franklin's The Science of Conjecture for histories of the early development of the very concept of mathematical probability. The theory of errors may be traced back to Roger Cotes's Opera Miscellanea (posthumous, 1722), but a memoir prepared by Thomas Simpson in 1755 (printed 1756) first applied the theory to the discussion of errors of observation.

### 1756

See Ian Hacking's The Emergence of Probability and James Franklin's The Science of Conjecture for histories of the early development of the very concept of mathematical probability. The theory of errors may be traced back to Roger Cotes's Opera Miscellanea (posthumous, 1722), but a memoir prepared by Thomas Simpson in 1755 (printed 1756) first applied the theory to the discussion of errors of observation.

### 1774

The first law was published in 1774, and stated that the frequency of an error could be expressed as an exponential function of the numerical magnitude of the error—disregarding sign.

### 1778

The second law of error was proposed in 1778 by Laplace, and stated that the frequency of the error is an exponential function of the square of the error.

### 1809

Gauss gave the first proof that seems to have been known in Europe (the third after Adrain's) in 1809.

### 1812

Further proofs were given by Laplace (1810, 1812), Gauss (1823), James Ivory (1825, 1826), Hagen (1837), Friedrich Bessel (1838), W.F.

### 1826

Further proofs were given by Laplace (1810, 1812), Gauss (1823), James Ivory (1825, 1826), Hagen (1837), Friedrich Bessel (1838), W.F.

### 1856

Donkin (1844, 1856), and Morgan Crofton (1870).

### 1906

Augustus De Morgan and George Boole improved the exposition of the theory. In 1906, Andrey Markov introduced the notion of Markov chains, which played an important role in stochastic processes theory and its applications.

### 1931

The modern theory of probability based on the measure theory was developed by Andrey Kolmogorov in 1931. On the geometric side, contributors to The Educational Times were influential (Miller, Crofton, McColl, Wolstenholme, Watson, and Artemas Martin).

### 2012

When arbitrarily many events A are of interest, not just two, the rule can be rephrased as posterior is proportional to prior times likelihood, P(A|B)\propto P(A) P(B|A) where the proportionality symbol means that the left hand side is proportional to (i.e., equals a constant times) the right hand side as A varies, for fixed or given B (Lee, 2012; Bertsch McGrayne, 2012).

All text is taken from Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License .

Page generated on 2021-08-05