The earliest writings on probability and statistics date back to Arab mathematicians and cryptographers, during the Islamic Golden Age between the 8th and 13th centuries. Al-Khalil (717–786) wrote the Book of Cryptographic Messages , which contains the first use of permutations and combinations, to list all possible Arabic words with and without vowels. The earliest book on statistics is the 9th-century treatise Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages , written by Arab scholar Al-Kindi (801–873). In his book, Al-Kindi gave a detailed description of how to use statistics and frequency analysis to decipher encrypted messages. This text laid the foundations for statistics and cryptanalysis. Al-Kindi also made the earliest known use of statistical inference, while he and later Arab cryptographers developed the early statistical methods for decoding encrypted messages. Ibn Adlan (1187–1268) later made an important contribution, on the use of sample size in frequency analysis. The e...
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