In 1901, Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Walter Weldon founded Biometrika, the first journal of mathematical statistics and biometry. In 1902, the US Census Bureau was made a permanent institution. In 1911, Karl Pearson founded the world’s first university statistics department at University College London.3

Statistical advances that occurred early in the 1900s included the chi-squared test for independence, P-value, random sampling, and Student’s (William Sealy Gossett’s) t-distribution and t-test. In 1901 Karl Pearson introduced the multivariate ananysis technique that now is called principal component analysis (PCA). Spearman introduced his rank correlation coefficient and a nonparametric estimate of a cumulative distribution function. By 1918 Ronald A. Fisher had introduced the concept of variance, promoted notation that clearly distinguished a parameter (e.g., σ2) from its estimate (S2), and had suggested the symbol "overbar X" for the sample mean. 

In 1907, Francis Galton describes the “wisdom of a crowd” - where the average of a large number of guesses comes close to the true value.  Government statistical activity greatly expanded during WWI due to the necessary increase in government functions.

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(Last revised: 2021-04-17)