How Books Tell a History of Statistics in Portugal: Works of Foreigners, Estrangeirados, and Others

TL;DR

This paper traces the development of mathematical statistics in Portugal, highlighting the influence of foreigners, exiled intellectuals, and domestic researchers through historical periods and institutional changes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive historical account of how foreign influence and domestic efforts shaped the evolution of statistics in Portugal.

Findings

Foreigners and 'estrangeirados' played a key role in early Portuguese statistics.

Institutional support and international exchange facilitated methodological advances.

Statistics transitioned from descriptive to inferential in Portuguese scientific practice.

Abstract

Foreigners and "estrangeirados", an expression meaning "people going to a foreign country ["estrangeiro"] getting there further education", had a leading role in the development of Mathematical Statistics in Portugal. In what concerns Statistics, "estrangeirados" in the nineteenth century were mainly liberal intellectuals exiled for political reasons. From 1930 onwards, the research funding authority sent university professors abroad, and hired foreign researchers to stay in Portuguese institutions, and some of them were instrumental in the importation of new concepts and methods of inferential statistics. After 1970, there was a huge program of sending young researchers abroad for doctoral studies. At the same time, many new universities and polytechnic institutes have been created in Portugal. After that, aside from foreigners who choose to have a research career in those institutions and the "estrangeirados" who had returned and created programs of doctoral studies, others, who hadn't the opportunity of studying abroad, began to play a decisive role in the development of Statistics in Portugal. The publication of handbooks on Probability and Statistics, thesis and core papers in Portuguese scientific journals, and also of works for the layman, reveals how Statistics progressed from descriptive to a mathematical discipline used for inference in all fields of knowledge, from natural sciences to methodology of scientific research.