science · 27 February 1735 · 289 years ago
death
Died 27 Feb 1735 at age 67 (baptized 29 Apr 1667).
Scottish physician, mathematician and essayist who published Of the Laws of Chance (1692), the first work on probability published in English, being his translation of a work by Huygens to which he added further games of chance. In 1710, he published a paper discussing the slight excess of male births over female births since 1629; it was perhaps the first application of probability to social statistics and included the first formal test of significance. As a political satirist, he wrote a series of pamphlets featuring the character John Bull that became an iconic Englishman. Arbuthnot joined with Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay in founding the famous Scriblerus Club. From 1705 he was physician to Queen Anne until her death in 1714.
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