Karl Pearson, the founder of mathematical statistics, was the leading statistical researcher from the 1890s up to about 1920. His interests were wide-ranging and so his impact on statistics in the United States was also wide-ranging. Many American researchers came to University College London to...

In his first work on probability, written in 1711, Abraham De Moivre looked at the problem of finding the number of trials required in a binomial experiment to achieve a probability of 1/2 of finding at least some given number of successes. He looked at two cases: when the probability of...