Probability and statistics are like friends who always hang out together. They help us make sense of the world around us by using numbers and facts.
A long, long time ago, people didn't really use probability and statistics. They just guessed at things and hoped for the best. But as time went on, smart people started thinking more about how to make better guesses.
In the 1600s, people started doing experiments to see if things were really true or not. They would flip a coin a bunch of times and count how many times it landed on heads or tails. This helped them figure out that the chance of getting heads or tails was 50/50.
In the 1700s, a guy named Bayes came up with a way to figure out the probability of something happening based on what we already know. This is called Bayesian analysis and it's a really powerful tool for making predictions.
In the 1800s, a guy named Gauss invented something called the normal distribution. This helped people understand how likely it was that something would happen, based on a big group of data points. It's really useful for things like predicting test scores or earnings.
In the 1900s, computers made it possible to do really complicated statistical analyses. And people started using statistics for all kinds of things - from market research to medical trials.
Today, probability and statistics are everywhere. You probably use them without even knowing it - like when you guess how many candies are in a jar, or when you try to predict the weather. And as our world gets more and more complex, we'll need probability and statistics even more to help us understand it.