"Statistical method consists of two main operations; counting and analysis. [...] The statistician has no use for information that cannot be expressed numerically, nor generally speaking, is he interested in isolated events or examples. The term 'data is itself plural and the statistician is concerned with the analysis of aggregates. " (Alfred R Ilersic, "Statistics", 1959)
"We are terribly clever people, we moderns: we bend Nature to our will in countless ways. We move mountains, we make caves, fly at speeds no other organism can achieve and tap the power of the atom. We are terribly clever. The essentially religious feeling of subserviency to a power greater than ourselves comes hard to us clever people. But by our intelligence we are now beginning to make out the limits of our cleverness, the impotence principles that say what can and cannot be. In an operational sense, we are experiencing a return to a religious orientation toward the world." (Garrett Hardin, "Nature and Man’s Fate", 1959)
"[Statistics] is concerned with things we can count. In so far as things, persons, are unique or ill-defi ned, statistics are meaningless and statisticians silenced; in so far as things are similar and definite - so many workers over 25, so many nuts and bolts made during December - they can be counted and new statistical facts are born." (Maurice S Bartlett, "Essays on Probability and Statistics", 1962)
"Statistics is the branch of scientific method which deals with the data obtained by counting or measuring the properties of populations of natural phenomena." (Sir Maurice G Kendall & Alan Stuart,"The Advanced Theory of Statistics", 1963)
"A set is countable if it is either finite or its members can be arranged in an infinite sequence; or, what is the same, there is a 1-1 map from the set into the positive integers.(Richard L Bishop & Samuel I Goldberg, "Tensor Analysis on Manifolds", 1968)
"Broadly speaking combinatorial analysis is now taught in two parts which I will label: The first classical, the second important. Classical combinatorics is concerned with counting problems. [...] As a mathematician, I like classical combinatorics. It is full of interesting devices: permutations, combinations, generating functions, amusing identities, etc. Relevant, it is not, except as a possible supplement to a basic course in probability. [...] Classical combinatorics is sometimes useful in preventing people from using an exhaustive procedure on the computer such as listing all combinations or examining all the cases. [...] The part of combinatorial analysis which I have labeled ‘important’ is concerned with selecting the best combination out of all the combinations. This is what linear programming is all about." (George B Dantzig, "On the relation of operations research to mathematics", [panel talk before AMS], 1971)
"For a long time the aim of combinatorial analysis was to count the different ways of arranging objects under given circumstances. Hence, many of the traditional problems of analysis or geometry which are concerned at a certain moment with finite structures, have a combinatorial character. Today, combinatorial analysis is also relevant to problems of existence, estimation and structuration, like all other parts of mathematics, but exclusively for finite sets." (Louis Comtet, "Advanced Combinatorics", 1974)
"Science gets most of its information by the process of reductionism, exploring the details, then the details of the details, until all the smallest bits of the structure, or the smallest parts of the mechanism, are laid out for counting and scrutiny. Only when this is done can the investigation be extended to encompass the whole organism or the entire system. So we say. Sometimes it seems that we take a loss, working this way." (Lewis Thomas, "The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher", 1974)
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