Who is Pierre-Simon?
In 1802, Pierre-Simon Laplace’s former student, Napoleon, approached him with a request: estimate the population of the current French Republic quickly and with minimal resources.
The task would be hard today. Back then, it must have of been daunting.
But after some thinking, Laplace realised that every parish priest in France dutifully noted baptisms, giving him a reliable way to count births.
Taking a step further, he reasoned that births and population size must be linked. He would not need to count all of France, just 30 parishes he picked randomly. This calculation yielded 1 birth per 28 people on average. All that was left to do was tally the parish records for total births in a year, and estimate the population.
Laplace had just invented the ratio estimator: an idea that is still one of the basic foundations of modern polling. Later, he would go on to contribute important ideas in probability theory which remain at the core of Bayesian statistics to this day.
We adopt his name to honour his genius, and to remind ourselves daily to approach problems with his creativity and grit.
