Recherches sur la probabilite des jugements en matiere criminelle et en matiere civile precedees des regles generales du calcul des probabilites.
1837S13080Paris:: Bachelier 1837. 1837. 4to. 4 ix 3 415 1 pp. Half title; light foxing within. Original quarter dark green gilt-stamped calf marbled boards; extremities worn. Very good. PROVENANCE: SIGNATURE OF KARL PEARSON 1857-1936. KARL PEARSON'S COPY WITH HIS BOLD SIGNATURE. First edition of the work that presented Poisson's 'Law of large numbers.' "He improved Laplace's work by relating it explicitly to Jacob Sernoulli's fundamental theorem and by showing that the invariance in the prior probabilities of mutually exclusive events is not a necessary condition for calculating the approximate probabilities. It is also from Poisson that we derive the study of a problem that Laplace had passed over the case of great asymmetry between opposite events such that the prior probability of either event is very small." :: DSB p. 489. / "Poisson's major work on probability was a book Recherches sur la probabilite. . . published in 1837. The book was in large part a treatise on probability theory after the manner of Laplace with an emphasis on the behavior of means of large numbers of measurements. The latter portion p. 318-415 dealt with the subject matter of the title. Some of this material was taken from memoirs Poisson published in the two preceding years. Only a charitable modern reading could identify a new concept in the work; yet the book contains the germ of the two things now most commonly associated with the Poisson's name. The first of these is the probability distribution now commonly called the Poisson distribution. . . In a section of the book concerned with the form of the binomial distribution for large numbers of trials Poisson does in fact derive this distribution in its cumulative form as a limit to the binomial distribution when the chance of a success is very small. The distribution appears on only one page in all of Poisson's work see p. 206. Although it is given no special emphasis tis brief notice did catch the eye of Cournot who republished it in 1843 with calculations demonstrating the effectiveness of the approximation Cournot 1843 . . . The second most common appearance of Poisson's name in modern literature is in connection with a generalization of the Bernoulli law of large numbers." :: Stigler. / "This work is significant for the author's participation in an important contemporary debate. The legitimacy of the application of the calculus to areas relating to the moral order that is to say within the broad area of what is now called the humanistic sciences was bitterly disputed beginning in 1820 in politically conservative circles. . . Poission was bold enough to take pen in hand to defend the universality of the probabilistic thesis and to demonstrate the conformability to the order of nature of the regularities that the calculus of probability without recourse to hidden causes reveals when things are subjected to a great number of observations." –DSB pp. 489. LAID WITHIN THIS VOLUME ARE FIVE PAGES ON FOUR LEAVES OF MATHEMATICAL NOTATIONS IN FRENCH SUGGESTING AN OWNERSHIP UNKNOWN PRIOR TO PEARSON. Karl Pearson 1857-1936 "was a major player in the early development of statistics as a serious scientific discipline in its own right. He founded the Department of Applied Statistics now the Department of Statistical Science at University College London in 1911; it was the first university statistics department in the world. The present departments of Statistical Science and Computer Science as well as the Genetics and Biometry group in Biology and the physical side of Anthropology are all part of his legacy to UCL." A major proponent of eugenics Pearson was also a protege and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. / REFERENCES: F. Fraunberger within DSB XV Supple. I pp. 480-491; Dodge Yadolah The Concise Encyclopedia of Statistics 2008 p. 427; Stigler The History of Statistics pp. 182-3. See: Pearson E.S. Karl Pearson: an appreciation of some aspects of his life and work. Cambridge University Press 1938. PLEASE CONTACT DIRECT FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. Bachelier, 1837. hardcover books
