ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Founders of statistics

Okay kiddo, let me tell you about the founders of statistics. Statistics is something we use to understand numbers and data. It helps us make sense of things by looking for patterns and trends.

The idea of using statistics began a long time ago, but the people who really started making it a science were a couple of guys named Carl Friedrich Gauss and Pierre-Simon Laplace. They lived in the 1700s and they were really, really good at math.

Gauss was especially important because he came up with a way to figure out the average of a bunch of numbers. This is called the "mean." He also had some ideas about probability, or how likely something was to happen.

Laplace, on the other hand, was interested in using statistics to figure out things like the underlying patterns in data. He called this "inference." He also had some ideas about how we could use statistics to predict things, like the weather or the chances of winning a lottery.

Later on, other people built on the ideas of Gauss and Laplace. There was a man named William Gosset, who worked for a beer company, and he figured out a way to use statistics to make sure the beer tasted consistent. And then there was a woman named Florence Nightingale, who used statistics to show how important it was to keep hospitals clean.

So, you see, it's pretty complicated, but these smart people helped us understand the world a lot better by using statistics.
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