The statistics are everywhere: in the grades of the school, in the surveys that aspire to anticipate an electoral result, in the discovery of new elementary particles. But what is so unique about this discipline? Stephen M. Stigler proposes that statistical wisdom rests on seven great conceptual pillars that have been maturing over the centuries and have contributed to make today, by its own merits, a versatile and rigorous science. By counting key situations, presenting ideas that were revolutionary at the time and the portrait of some bold thinkers, Stigler describes how to discard part of the data can actually describe them better, how information increases as the number of observations grows , how probability has been used to quantify the precision of a measurement, how the internal variation of the data may be sufficient to study them, how what has already been observed allows us...read more