9312693 Klein It is important to remember that relationship between science and society is not a one-way street. While clearly science has revolutionized our lives, society has itself influenced the development of science. This is true even of the most esoteric of sciences, i.e. mathematics. Dr. Klein is examining the direct influence of commercial bankers and merchants on the development of modern statistical practices. Statistics, originally developed as a study of mass phenomena in a state of rest, eventually came to be used to analyze dynamic systems. Dr. Klein is investigating the practical roots to the techniques statisticians use to transform time series data from fluctuations into deviations. Her research so far has indicated a chronological primacy to what she calls `monetary algorithms,' which were developed by European merchants and financiers in the 17th through 19th centuries. In applications of relative time frameworks, first differences, index numbers and moving averages, commercial practice preceded political arithmetic, which in turn fed into scientific investigation and statistical theory. Her periodization from commercial to political to scientific arithmetic parallels a comparison of forms of statistical representation of temporal phenomena from the tabular to the graphical to the algebraic modes. This investigation addresses the interplay of deception and accountability in the development of statistical tools, the relative contributions of the practice and the theory of monetary exchange to mathematical statistics, and historical distinctions between processes modeled as functions of time and those modeled as functions of place in a sequence. The endpoint for this study is the identification in 1938 of stationary stochastic processes. ***
