# World Statistics Atlas — verification record

**Author:** Archer Wu  
**Data cutoff:** 31 December 2025  
**Full event-by-event review:** 19 July 2026  
**Edition update:** 21 July 2026

This edition contains **108 selected events**, **129 mapped places** and **16 multi-location events**. On 21 July 2026, four milestones connected to China were added and four overlapping pairs were combined. Entries not otherwise changed retain the full review completed on 19 July 2026.

The atlas is an AI-assisted editorial selection, not an official or exhaustive history. Each entry links to an original paper, official record or authoritative historical source wherever possible. Formal citations should use those linked sources.

## Current entries

| ID | Year | Event | Review status | Places |
|---|---:|---|---|---:|
| e109 | AD 2 | Han household registers preserve a large-scale population count | qualified | 1 |
| e001 | 1086 | The 1086 Domesday survey becomes an early model of administrative enumeration | qualified | 1 |
| e002 | 1654 | The Pascal–Fermat correspondence lays the foundations of classical probability | qualified | 2 |
| e004 | 1657 | Huygens publishes the first printed textbook on probability | qualified | 1 |
| e003 | 1662 | Graunt analyses London’s Bills of Mortality | confirmed | 1 |
| e005 | 1713 | Bernoulli’s Ars Conjectandi presents an early law of large numbers | confirmed | 1 |
| e006 | 1718 | De Moivre’s Doctrine of Chances builds a system of probability calculation | confirmed | 1 |
| e007 | 1733 | De Moivre derives a normal approximation to the binomial distribution | confirmed | 1 |
| e008 | 1763 | Bayes’s posthumous essay is published by the Royal Society | qualified | 1 |
| e009 | 1774 | Laplace develops inverse probability into a general method | confirmed | 1 |
| e010 | 1786 | Playfair publishes The Commercial and Political Atlas | confirmed | 1 |
| e011 | 1790 | The United States conducts its first federal census | confirmed | 1 |
| e012 | 1801 | Great Britain conducts its first national census | corrected | 1 |
| e013 | 1805 | Legendre publishes the method of least squares | confirmed | 1 |
| e014 | 1809 | Gauss links least squares with a normal theory of errors | confirmed | 1 |
| e015 | 1812 | Laplace publishes Théorie analytique des probabilités | confirmed | 1 |
| e016 | 1834 | The Statistical Society of London is founded | confirmed | 1 |
| e017 | 1835 | Quetelet proposes the ‘average man’ and social physics | confirmed | 1 |
| e018 | 1839 | The American Statistical Association is founded | confirmed | 1 |
| e019 | 1839 | William Farr advances vital statistics and cause-of-death classification at the General Register Office | corrected | 1 |
| e020 | 1846 | Belgium’s census adopts Quetelet’s scientific organization | confirmed | 1 |
| e021 | 1853 | The first International Statistical Congress meets | confirmed | 1 |
| e022 | 1854 | John Snow combines mapping with water-supply evidence in the 1854 cholera investigation | qualified | 1 |
| e023 | 1858 | Nightingale uses polar-area charts to press for military health reform | confirmed | 1 |
| e024 | 1869 | Galton uses quantitative comparison to study heredity and human differences | qualified | 1 |
| e025 | 1881 | India completes its first full synchronous decennial census | qualified | 1 |
| e026 | 1885 | Galton reports “regression towards mediocrity” | qualified | 1 |
| e027 | 1885 | The International Statistical Institute is founded and begins a regular world congress | qualified | 2 |
| e029 | 1890 | Hollerith’s tabulating machines process the U.S. census | confirmed | 1 |
| e030 | 1895 | Pearson develops a system of frequency curves | corrected | 1 |
| e031 | 1900 | Pearson publishes the chi-squared goodness-of-fit test | confirmed | 1 |
| e032 | 1901 | Biometrika is founded | confirmed | 1 |
| e033 | 1906 | Markov chains take shape | confirmed | 1 |
| e034 | 1908 | ‘Student’ publishes the t distribution and small-sample test | confirmed | 1 |
| e035 | 1912 | Gini publishes a measure of variability later associated with his name | corrected | 1 |
| e036 | 1918 | Fisher partitions variance and connects it with Mendelian inheritance | corrected | 2 |
| e037 | 1919 | Fisher joins Rothamsted Experimental Station, a laboratory for modern experimental statistics | corrected | 1 |
| e038 | 1920 | Japan conducts its first modern population census | confirmed | 1 |
| e039 | 1921 | Wright introduces path analysis | confirmed | 1 |
| e040 | 1922 | Fisher systematizes maximum likelihood, sufficiency and information | corrected | 1 |
| e041 | 1924 | Shewhart draws the first statistical process-control chart | corrected | 1 |
| e042 | 1925 | Statistical Methods for Research Workers is published | confirmed | 1 |
| e043 | 1926 | Randomization, replication and blocking enter field-experiment design | qualified | 1 |
| e045 | 1931 | The Indian Statistical Institute is founded | confirmed | 1 |
| e044 | 1933 | The Neyman–Pearson framework of hypothesis testing takes systematic form | confirmed | 1 |
| e046 | 1933 | Kolmogorov axiomatizes probability | confirmed | 1 |
| e047 | 1936 | Mahalanobis publishes a systematic paper on generalized distance | qualified | 1 |
| e048 | 1937 | Neyman gives confidence intervals a frequentist theory | confirmed | 1 |
| e049 | 1940 | Deming and Stephan iteratively adjust contingency-table margins | corrected | 1 |
| e050 | 1945 | Wald publishes the sequential probability ratio test | corrected | 1 |
| e052 | 1945 | Wilcoxon rank tests advance nonparametric statistics | corrected | 1 |
| e051 | 1946 | The Monte Carlo method takes shape at Los Alamos | qualified | 1 |
| e053 | 1947 | The United Nations Statistical Commission holds its first regular session | corrected | 1 |
| e054 | 1948 | WHO assumes responsibility for the ICD as the Sixth Revision is adopted in 1948 | qualified | 2 |
| e055 | 1950 | India launches the National Sample Survey | qualified | 2 |
| e056 | 1950 | Deming teaches statistical quality control in Japan | confirmed | 1 |
| e057 | 1951 | The Robbins–Monro stochastic-approximation algorithm | confirmed | 1 |
| e058 | 1952 | The Horvitz–Thompson estimator unifies unequal-probability sampling | confirmed | 1 |
| e059 | 1953 | The Metropolis algorithm is published | confirmed | 1 |
| e060 | 1953 | The United Nations publishes the first System of National Accounts | confirmed | 1 |
| e061 | 1958 | The Kaplan–Meier survival curve is published | qualified | 2 |
| e063 | 1958 | Tukey names and promotes the jackknife | qualified | 1 |
| e062 | 1960 | The Kalman filter is published | confirmed | 1 |
| e064 | 1964 | The Box–Cox transformation is proposed | qualified | 2 |
| e065 | 1965 | The Cooley–Tukey fast Fourier transform is published | corrected | 2 |
| e066 | 1970 | Hastings generalizes the Metropolis algorithm | confirmed | 1 |
| e067 | 1970 | The Box–Jenkins system for time-series modelling is published | qualified | 1 |
| e068 | 1972 | The Cox proportional-hazards model is published | corrected | 1 |
| e069 | 1972 | Generalized linear models unify many response distributions | confirmed | 2 |
| e070 | 1974 | The Akaike information criterion takes shape | confirmed | 1 |
| e071 | 1974 | Rubin defines causal effects through potential outcomes | qualified | 1 |
| e072 | 1976 | Rubin frames statistical inference with missing data | qualified | 1 |
| e073 | 1977 | The EM algorithm unifies maximum-likelihood computation with latent variables | qualified | 2 |
| e074 | 1977 | Tukey publishes Exploratory Data Analysis | confirmed | 1 |
| e075 | 1979 | Efron introduces the bootstrap | confirmed | 1 |
| e110 | 1980 | Kai-Tai Fang and Yuan Wang develop uniform experimental design | qualified | 1 |
| e111 | 1982 | China’s third national census establishes a modern statistical baseline for a population above one billion | qualified | 1 |
| e076 | 1983 | Propensity scores reshape the design and adjustment of observational studies | corrected | 2 |
| e077 | 1984 | Gibbs sampling enters modern statistics through image restoration | confirmed | 1 |
| e078 | 1984 | CART establishes a system of interpretable tree models | qualified | 3 |
| e112 | 1984 | Anne Chao develops a nonparametric estimator for unseen classes | qualified | 1 |
| e079 | 1986 | Generalized estimating equations handle correlated repeated measurements | confirmed | 1 |
| e080 | 1986 | The DerSimonian–Laird random-effects meta-analysis | confirmed | 1 |
| e081 | 1990 | Gelfand and Smith bring Bayesian MCMC into widespread use | qualified | 2 |
| e082 | 1992 | The R project begins and is formally introduced as an open statistical environment | qualified | 1 |
| e083 | 1994 | The United Nations establishes and later endorses the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics | qualified | 1 |
| e084 | 1995 | Benjamini and Hochberg introduce false discovery rate control | corrected | 1 |
| e085 | 1996 | The lasso uses an L1 penalty for shrinkage and variable selection | corrected | 1 |
| e087 | 1996 | Breiman introduces bagging | confirmed | 1 |
| e088 | 1997 | CRAN creates a shared network for R packages | confirmed | 1 |
| e089 | 2000 | Pearl’s Causality systematizes structural causal models | confirmed | 1 |
| e090 | 2001 | Random forests are published | confirmed | 1 |
| e091 | 2001 | Friedman formulates the gradient boosting machine | confirmed | 1 |
| e092 | 2005 | Conformal prediction gives distribution-free prediction sets | corrected | 2 |
| e093 | 2006 | Differential privacy is introduced | corrected | 4 |
| e094 | 2006 | Targeted maximum likelihood learning is published | corrected | 1 |
| e095 | 2009 | ggplot2 reshapes statistical graphics through a grammar of graphics | confirmed | 1 |
| e096 | 2010 | Synthetic control creates a framework for comparative case studies | confirmed | 1 |
| e097 | 2010 | The first World Statistics Day | confirmed | 1 |
| e098 | 2011 | The Stan project brings general Bayesian probabilistic programming into practice | qualified | 1 |
| e100 | 2016 | The ASA issues its statement on p values and statistical significance | confirmed | 1 |
| e101 | 2017 | The Cape Town Global Action Plan for Sustainable Development Data | confirmed | 1 |
| e103 | 2018 | Double/debiased machine learning is published | qualified | 4 |
| e104 | 2019 | The ‘Moving to a World Beyond p < 0.05’ issue advances inference reform | qualified | 1 |
| e105 | 2020 | The Johns Hopkins COVID-19 global dashboard goes online | confirmed | 1 |
| e106 | 2020 | Major 2020 U.S. Census products use differential privacy | qualified | 1 |
| e107 | 2021 | Methods for analysing causal relationships receive the Nobel Prize in economics | qualified | 1 |
| e108 | 2025 | The United Nations adopts the 2025 System of National Accounts | confirmed | 1 |