Description

The computer has always enabled statisticians to carry out their tasks effectively and, through subsequent developments in digital technology, with increasing efficiency. Computer technology has also enabled statisticians to identify new areas of activity and to discover and define new tasks or areas of research. In other words, the computer has been the driving force for statisticians to go into new, untapped areas such as bootstrapping. In this sense, the computer has been the secret of statisticians’ success.

Bootstrapping technologies are applied in areas such as computing, physics, law, and even linguistics. However, the term refers to quite different applications, such as the booting process to start a computer or the theory as to why children can learn a language intuitively. But these methods have one thing in common: they refer to a self-starting process that may proceed without additional input.

Etymologically speaking, the term "bootstrap" refers to a variation of Rudolf Erich Raspe’s *The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen*. While the published version states that Munchausen pulls himself and his horse out of a swamp by using his pigtail, in another variation, he does so by using his own bootstrap. The statistical bootstrap method always relies on random sampling and, thus, would not be feasible in practice without a programmable computing machine. Not surprisingly, it was introduced  during a time when the first personal computers, such as the Commodore PET, were already on the market. Obviously, the bootstrap technology advanced further due to computational development, 

It is not only through bootstrap resampling techniques that statistics has made great strides; the highly complex methods of non- and semi-parametric additive models have also been made possible through computers. In other scientific disciplines too, computers have had a massive impact: big data, smart data, remote sensing, global land surveys, digital geography, and digital cartography are all areas of science that have been established and have thrived through the use of computers.

However, this book is not focused on land-set data or computing in medicine but will concentrate on computing machines and how they led to new statistical methods. This book showcases parts of the C.A.S.E. computer museum, an official scientific collection of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Furthermore, this book outlines the development from manually preprocessed and edited data, as found on punched cards, to today’s status quo, where data is generated and stored every time we visit a webpage or buy food at a grocery shop.