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Pioneering scholar talks Stigler’s Law, French lotteries and statistical history
At any given university, statisticians aren’t usually at the top of the list of library visitors. But when Prof. Emeritus Stephen Stigler was a visiting associate professor of statistics at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s, he found himself drawn to the libraries and their archives of math publications.
He was surprised to find, in an issue of the
American Journal of Mathematics from the 1920s, some principles related to his doctoral thesis that had been stated four decades before but apparently lost in the literature. Then he found another example an article written in 1816-1818 by French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace that included a mathematical result that was unknown at the time of Stigler s reading. ....

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