ABSTRACT
The history of statistics is not the history of one tradition but of several, for the term 'statistics' has been used to refer to several different ideas. The practice of counting and recording characteristics of the population and material resources goes back to Antiquity, but received new impetus in the early seventeenth century, a period of rapid socioeconomic change, with the spread of merchant capitalism and its spirit of systematic empirical inquiry. Probability theory or the calculus of chances is the mathematical formulation of the expected regularities in events, and has its roots in the analysis of games of chance such as cards and dice. The significance level is the probability of taking the sample findings to indicate or signify that the substantive research hypothesis is true of the population when it is in fact peculiar to the sample.
