[R] "chi-square" | "chi-squared" | "chi squared" | "chi, square"

Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D. therne@u @end|ng |rom m@yo@edu
Sat Oct 19 15:04:16 CEST 2019


Martin,
   A fun question.

Looking back at my oldest books, Feller (1950) used chi-square.
Then I walked down the hall to our little statistics library and looked at Johnson and 
Kotz, "Continous Univariate Distributions", since each chapter therein has comments about 
the history of the distribution.

  a.  They use 'chi-square' throughout their history section, tracing the distribution 
back to work in the 1800s.  But, those earliest papers apparently didn't name their 
results as chi- whatever, so an "origin" story didn't pan out.

  b. They have 13 pages of references, and for fun I counted the occurence of variants.  
The majority of papers don't have the word in the title at all and the next most common is 
the Greek symbol. Here are the years of the others:

chi-square:   73 43 65 80 86 73 82 73 69 69 78 64 64 86 65 86 82 82 76 82 88 81 74 77 87 
86 93 69 60 88 88 80 77 41 59 79 31
chi-squared: 72 76 82 83 89 79 69 67 77 78 69 77 83 88 87 89 78
chi:  92 73 89 87
chi-squares: 77 83
chi-bar-square: 91

There doesn't look to be a trend over time.  The 1922 Fisher reference uses the Greek 
symbol, by the way.

Terry T


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]



More information about the R-help mailing list