The eighteenth century was a time of great expectations for science. Using the incredible work of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) as a starting point, scientists were making important discoveries in all parts of the natural world. The success of Newtonian principles in the physical sciences led others to apply similar principles to their own fields of study. Specialists in the biological sciences, earth sciences, and even social sciences had hopes of quantifying their studies following Newtonian principles. During this flurry of quantification, the field of probability began to take shape.
Other mathematicians contributed to the theory of probability before the nineteenth century. James Bernoulli's The Art of Conjecturing, published posthumously in 1713, addressed problems in probability related to gambling. Abraham De Moivre's Doctrine of Chances became the first English-language work on probability in 1718. In this work Moivre (1667-1754) introduced the famous normal curve, usually referred to as the bell curve today. Despite these early discussions of probability, it was not until the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries that probability and statistics began to seriously influence science and society as a whole.
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