Ars Conjectandi is not a book that non-statisticians will have heard of, nor one that many statisticians will have heard of either. The title means ‘The Art of Conjecturing’ – which in turn means roughly ‘What You Can Work Out From the Evidence.’ But it is worth statisticians celebrating it, because it is the book that gave an adequate mathematical foundation to their discipline, and it was published 300 years ago this year.

More people will have heard of its author. Jacob Bernouilli was one of a huge mathematical family of Bernoullis. In physics, aircraft engineers base everything they do on Bernoulli’s principle. It explains how aircraft wings give lift, is the basis of fluid dynamics, and was discovered by Jacob’s nephew Daniel Bernoulli.