Timeline of probability and statistics

1654 - Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat create the theory of probability,
1693 - Edmund Halley prepares the first mortality tables statistically relating death rate to age,

1724 - Abraham de Moivre studies mortality statistics and the foundation of the theory of annuities in Annuities on Lives,
1733 - Abraham de Moivre introduces the normal distribution to approximate the binomial distribution in probability,
1761 - Thomas Bayes proves Bayes' theorem,

1805 - Adrien-Marie Legendre introduces the method of least squares for fitting a curve to a given set of observations,

1933 - Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov publishes his book Basic notions of the calculus of probability (Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung) which contains an axiomatization of probability based on measure theory,
1943 - Kenneth Levenberg proposes a method for nonlinear least squares fitting,
1953 - Nicholas Metropolis introduces the idea of thermodynamic simulated annealing algorithms,
1962 - Donald Marquardt proposes the Levenberg-Marquardt nonlinear least squares fitting algorithm,