After 1975: histories of probability and statistics

This book happened to be the first in a wave of new studies of probability and its past. Such work was soon to be cultivated by a research group at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forshchung in Bielefeld, 1982–3. Lorenz Krüger gathered together twenty-odd scholars, many of them young and working on their first major project. Such groups seldom gel. Krüger's did – thanks to his planning and leadership, and his own exceptional character. The subject was changed permanently, and not only by the in-house publications emanating from Bielefeld. New benchmarks were established, starting with books by members of the group: Ted Porter's The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900 (Princeton 1986), Steve Stigler's The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Chicago 1986), Raine Daston's Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton 1988). Add in my own Taming of Chance (Cambridge 1990) and you have the start of an amazing little library.

Doubtless the take-off in history would have occurred without this collective activity. Much of the work published directly after 1983 was already in preparation before Lorenz brought us together in Bielefeld. Donald Mackenzie had already written Statistics in Britain 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh 1981). And I should mention an amusing reminder that many more minds were out there. English-speakers at Bielefeld met regularly to try to improve our German.