7. Probability and Statistics Soviet Essays - Sheynin, Oscar

abandoned in August 1936, but it is nevertheless remarkable that Khinchin had notcondemned any saboteur. Then, his comparison of pre-1917 with the 1930s is not convincingalso because, for example, British statisticians could have made similar conclusions in favorof the later period.Khinchin made mistakes when describing the history of probability which once againproves that in those times hardly anyone knew it. He favored the Laplacean justification ofthe method of least squares at the expense of Gauss; he did not mention Bienaymé; did notexplain Laplace’s part in proving the De Moivre – Laplace limit theorem, etc. But the mostdisappointing error (that bears on one of his important conclusions) is his failure to noticethat Chebyshev’s main papers in probability had appeared in French in Europe; again, hisOeuvres were published in Petersburg, in 1899 and 1907, in Russian and French. A similarstatement is true with regard to Markov and Liapunov. The second edition of Markov’streatise (1908) as well as three of his papers were translated into German in 1912. Liapunovpublished his memoirs in Petersburg, but in French, and both his preliminary notes appearedin the C.r. Acad. Sci. Paris. Moreover, Khinchin declares that Liapunov’s works inmechanics also remained unknown, but this is what Liapunov wrote to Markov on 24.3.1901(Archive, Russian Acad. Sci., Fond 173, Inventory 1, Item 11, p. 17), apparently inconnection with his forthcoming election to full membership at the Petersburg Academy ofSciences:You are asking me whether foreign scientists have referred to my works. If you needto know it, I ought to indicate […]He listed Poincaré, Picard, Appell, Tisserand, Levi-Cività and two lesser known figuresand added that cannot say anything about Klein.Still, I hesitate to deny Khinchin’s overall conclusion that Western scientists had not beensufficiently acquainted with the work being done in Russia. An important related fact is that asimilar inference about Russian scholars would have been wrong. Here is Liapunov’sappropriate remark from his letter to Markov of 28.10.1895 (same Archive; Fond, Inventoryand Item, p. 12):Believing that it is very desirable that Chebyshev’s contributions {Oeuvres} be published assoon as possible, I am prepared to participate here. […] I ought to say, however, that, owingto my rather superficial knowledge of French, I am afraid to take up translations fromRussian into French. As to the translations from French into Russian, I could undertake themalthough I do not quite sympathize with this business. […] I think that any {Russian}mathematician is able to read French.Days bygone![1] The theory of probability belongs to those very few branches of the mathematicalscience whose level of culture, even in pre-revolutionary Russia, was not lower than that inforeign countries. Even more can be stated: During the second half of the 19 th century and thefirst years of this {the 20 th } century, Russia was nearly the only country where themathematical foundations of probability had been cultivated as earnestly as it deserved owingto its outstanding part in natural sciences, technology and social practice 1 . The Russiantheory of probability completely owes its exceptional standing to the works of Chebyshev.Being in this respect considerably ahead of his time, this great scholar paved new ways tosolving many problems dating back for a number of decades. Chebyshev also created inRussia the tradition, which, after being grasped by his followers, prompted many Russian