After I cited Stigler, to the effect that Quetelet never used the term
'normal' for the distribution,
on 14 Apr 2000 09:53:05 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alan Hutson)
wrote:
>
> Kendall and Stuart have a footnote attributing the term to Galton
> however there is no reference
I thought that Stigler had probably followed up on his research, so I
looked further. I discovered that he has a 1999 book, too, on the
history of statistical concepts and procedures.
In that Book, page 404: There must have been a broad, "evolving
conceptual understanding" of measurement in the 1870s -- since there
seems to have been THREE independent appearances of that name for the
Normal curve, from Charles S. Peirce (1873), Francis Galton (1877),
and Wilhelm Lexis (1877).
He also says, the name "standard" had been proposed as early as 1838.
And the "bell-shaped curve" has been dated to Jouffret, 1872 -- who
was (particularly) describing the bivariate normal.
--
Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
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