FECHNER, GUSTAV THEODOR. - THE FREQUENCY INTERPRETATION OF PROBABILITY.

Kollektivmasslehre. Im Auftrage der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften. Herausgegeben von Gottl. Friedr. Lipps.

Leipzig, Wilhelm Engelmann, 1897. Lex8vo. Orig. hcalf. Spine gilt and with gilt lettering. Covers with a few scratches. X;483 pp. Stamps to foot of titlepage. Internally fine and clean.

First edition. Fechner is noted for the introduction of quantitative methods into psychology (e.g. Fechner's Law). His most importent contribution to statistics is his posthumously published book on the measurements of collectives, his "Kollektivmasslehre" from 1897. The main examples he treated are to be found in anthropology, zoology, botany, meteorology and aesthetics.

"Fechner's Kollektivmasslehre was of immediate influence on many of his colleagues in Leipzig. The psychologists Gottlob Friedrich Lipps, Wilhelm Wirth and to some extent also Wilhelm Wundt used the new methods in psychophysics. Charles Edward Spearman who obtained his Ph.D. under Wundt extended Fechner's ideas and studied the correlation between magnitudes. The Leipzig astronomer and mathematician Heinrich Bruns (1848-1919) soon gave a general solution to Fechner's problem of a mathematical representation of frequency distributions, the so-called Bruns-series (today called Gram-Charlier series) and tried to unify Fechner's theory of collectives with probability theory. His most illustrious student was Felix Hausdorff who carried this tradition further. (Girlich 1996) Bruns and Hausdorff, however, dropped Fechner's requirement of chance variation of the collective object, thus obscuring any trace of Fechner's indeterminism." (The Encyclopedia sponsored by Statistics and Probability Societies).

Order-nr.: 48338