Disciplines

Statistics

Also Known As Stats

Citation Formats

General Reference

Science Atlas. "Statistics." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-science.interactiveatlas.org/disciplines/statistics.

APA Style

Science Atlas. (n.d.). Statistics. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-science.interactiveatlas.org/disciplines/statistics

BibTeX

@misc{scienceatlas-statistics,
  author = {Science Atlas},
  title = {Statistics},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-science.interactiveatlas.org/disciplines/statistics},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Statistics is the science of collecting, summarizing, and interpreting numerical data, and of measuring how much uncertainty attaches to the conclusions drawn from it. It has several distinct roots rather than one, probability theory from the seventeenth century, state record keeping and social statistics in the eighteenth and nineteenth, and the mathematical framework for testing hypotheses that Ronald Fisher and Karl Pearson built in the early twentieth century, so no single founding year is recorded here.

Facts

Central Questionthe subject's own account

How can a genuine underlying pattern be distinguished from mere chance variation in a limited sample of data, and how confidently can a conclusion drawn from that sample be generalized beyond it? 1

Scopethe subject's own account

Statistics is the discipline concerned with the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data, providing the methods used to draw reliable conclusions from data that contains random variation. 1

Significancethe subject's own account

Ronald Fisher's work in the 1920s and 1930s, including the design of experiments, analysis of variance and the concept of statistical significance itself, is widely credited with founding the discipline of modern statistics as practiced across the sciences today. 1

Disputed

Founded Year

1901 1

the subject's own accountKarl Pearson founded the journal Biometrika in 1901, commonly cited as marking statistics' emergence as its own mathematical discipline; Thomas Bayes's posthumously published 1763 essay is an earlier theoretical root, and Pearson did not found the world's first university statistics department, at University College London, until 1911.

Cross-Tradition Connections