From the wiki:
"Stochastic" comes from the Greek "στόχος", noun, masculine, "aim", "guess".
The term "stochastic", to mean 'based on the theory of probability' is due to Mr. Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, of LeHavre. He meant it in the "sense" of 'making conjectures that the Greek term bears since ancient philosophers."
---- Dear Renata,
---------- No, I won't be able to
---------- go to your house today. It's
---------- raining very hard. I AIM
---------- to go. But if I do, it's
---------- YOUR guess. Plato used
---------- 'stokhos' like this, and I
---------- I hope you won't mind my
---------- closing this letter with,
---------------- Stochastically yours.
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That was meant as a joke!
ReplyDeleteA contributor to this blog -- who contributed with a paper on the immortality of the soul -- wrote to me: "The blog is a satire, right?". Ah well.
Владислав Иосифович Борткевич, Władysław Bortkiewicz, L. Bortkevič L. Bortkěvič), August 7, 1868 – July 15, 1931) was a Russian economist and statistician.
"He was of minor nobility."
"Bortkiewicz was born in Saint Petersburg" -- in Europe, not in Florida, which is MY haunt!
"In 1898 he published a book titled The Law of Small Numbers[1]."
but the size font did not help the reviewers.
"The data give the number of soldiers killed by being kicked by a horse each year in each of 14 cavalry corps over a 20-year period. Bortkiewicz showed that those numbers follow a Poisson distribution."
of both soldiers -- and horses.
"Bortkiewicz attempted to predict how many pieces of artillery would overheat in an intensive battle. He failed in this because of his limited knowledge of thermodynamics and metallic composition of cannons."
Similary, a student of mine attempted a thesis on "how many pieces of conventional implicata overheat a cancellabilist". She failed for other reasons.
"Bortkiewicz died in Berlin, Germany. His papers, including a voluminous correspondence file (some 1,000 letters 1876–1931)"
including that one to Renata, signed,
"Stochastically yours x x x o o o"
"are deposited at Uppsala University in Sweden"
He wrote:
Die mittlere Lebensdauer. Die Methoden ihrer Bestimmung und ihr Verhältnis zur Sterblichkeitsmessung. Gustav Fischer, Jena 1893 (Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum)
"Review of Léon Walras, Éléments d'économie politique pure, 2e édit.", 1890, Revue d'économie politique
Das Gesetz der kleinen Zahlen, 1898
"Wertrechnung und Preisrechnung im Marxschen System", 1907, Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.
"On the Correction of Marx's Fundamental Theoretical Construction in the Third Volume of Capital."
Die Iterationen, 1917
Value and Price in the Marxian System, 1952, IEP.
References
Joseph Schumpeter: Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, Economic Journal, Vol. 42 (1932), pp. 338–340, reprinted in: Ten great economists from Marx to Keynes (New York, 1960), pp. 302–305
Emil Julius Gumbel: Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 2 (New York, 1968), pp. 128–131.
Paul A. Samuelson. Resolving a Historical Confusion in Population Analysis. Human Biology, 48, 1976: S. 559–580.
^ See also: "Das Gesetz der kleinen Zahlen" in Monatshefte für Mathematik vol. 9 p. A39 1898. DOI link
^ p.e. I J Good, Some statistical applications of Poisson's work, Statist. Sci. 1 (2) (1986), 157–180. JSTOR link
^ L.v.Bortkiewicz Archiv, Manuskript & Musik Abteilung, Universitätsbibliothek Uppsala,
Mihajlo D. Mesarovic