The simplest form of statistical analysis of data is the summarization of a data set in terms of summary (descriptive) statistics (including measures of a central tendency, such as the arithmetic mean, or measures of variation, such as the range). However, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the work of people such as Gerolamo Cardano, Blaise Pascal, Jakob Bernoulli, Abraham de Moivre, Thomas Bayes, and Richard Price laid the foundations of probability theory, and through the nineteenth century many statisticians began to use probability distributions as part of their analytic tool
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