Talk:Poisson clumping
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An angry Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door
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- The Poisson process, developed when Poisson consulted for the Prussian Army with regard to Prussian Army officers and the frequency with which they were being killed after being kicked by horses
- The Poisson process, developed when Poisson consulted for the Prussian Army with regard to Prussian Army officers and the frequency with which they were being killed after being kicked by horses
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Huh?? Really??? The source cited for this surprising claim is this item by a journalist. That item says:
- This process, Kelton points out, was discovered by the French mathematician and probabilist Poisson, who was consulting with the Prussian army to explain why so may [sic] Prussian army officers were being killed by getting kicked by horses.
This is not _quite_ as silly as the student blooper that said "An angry Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door", but it's worth an honorable mention. Simeon Denis Poisson died in 1840. He developed the probability distribution known as the Poisson distribution. It was the economist Bortkiewicz who included in his book published 58 years after Poisson's death the statistical study of Prussian cavalrymen killed by horse kicks. It was precisely because that was a rare event that he used it as an example of that method of statistical analysis. His other famous example was data on suicides by prepubescent children, also included because it's a rare event. This article is quite deficient and needs some substantial content and good sources. Maybe I'll attend to this at some point. Michael Hardy (talk) 19:47, 1 May 2015 (UTC)