‎"SIMPSON, THOMAS.‎
‎A Letter to the Right Honourable George, Earl of Macclesfield, President of the Royal Society, as to the Advantage of taking the Mean of a Number of Observations in Practical Astronomy - [""A MILESTONE IN STATISTICAL INFERENCE, AS WELL AS THE EARLIEST FORMAL TREATMENT OF ANY DATA-PROCESSING PRACTICE""]‎

‎(London, L. Davis, 1756). 4to. In recent marbled wrappers. In ""Philosophical Transactions"", Volume 49, 1755. All leaves reinforced in margin. Fine and clean. (14) [Leaves of contents to to vol. 49] Pp. 82-93 ‎

Reference : 59948

‎First edition of Simpson’s landmark paper: ""a milestone in statistical inference, as well as the earliest formal treatment of any data-processing practice"" (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace). “Simpson was the first to attempt a mathematical proof of the law of large numbers" i.e., that the mean result of several observations is nearer to the truth than any single observations. A key feature of the paper was that Simpson chose to focus “not on the observations themselves . . . but on the error made in the observations, on the differences between the recorded observations and the actual position of the body being observed. . . [This] was the critical step that was to open the door to an applicable quantification of uncertainty” (Stigler 1986, 90-91). “Simpson was the first to characterize the errors in observations as independent events, taking positive and negative values with equal probabilities, and the first to provide a mathematical expression for the probability that the error in the mean result will lie between assigned limits” (Origins of Cyberspace, no 16.) Hook and Norman, Origins of Cyberspace, no. 16‎