Predicting the Unknown: The History and Future of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

Epilogue: The Certainty of Uncertainty

In this journey, you saw various heroes. Ancient philosophers like Aristotle touched upon the problem of uncertainty, which their more modern counterparts, like Hume, tried to answer. The mathematicians of the Renaissance came up with the first quantification of uncertainty in the form of probability theory, which formed the basis of the discipline of statistics. The Enlightenment brought new concepts and tools like the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem, proving that even in the face of uncertainty, nature seems to follow certain regularities.

Fisher gave us the foundations of statistics, and the methods in research design that are still being used in practice, while hypothesis testing is ...