The rise & fall & rise again of statistics

The surprising drivers of mathematical innovation

The other day, in an attempt to lift the mood of three-dozen twenty-somethings from an IIM that I was leading through an online mathematical model-building class, I cheerily announced: “Kids, let’s celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Gaussian distribution!”

I assumed they would all jump and join my cheering. Instead, I was greeted with puzzled looks and silence.

Finally, one picked up the courage to ask me: “Sir, you mean the Gaussian distribution that we use every day as part of our cutting-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence work is that old?”

“Yes”, I said. “Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was