document_title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)

question_text: where was the movie one flew over the cuckoo's nest filmed

question_tokens: where was the movie one flew over the cuckoo 's nest filmed

text: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)

text: Plot[edit]

text: In 1963 Oregon, recidivist criminal Randle McMurphy is moved to a mental institution after serving a short sentence on a prison farm for statutory rape of a 15-year-old. Though not actually mentally ill, McMurphy hopes to avoid hard labor and serve the rest of his sentence in a relaxed environment. Upon arriving at the hospital, he finds the ward run by the steely, strict Nurse Ratched, who subtly suppresses the actions of her patients through a passive-aggressive routine, intimidating the patients.

text: The other patients include anxious, stuttering Billy Bibbit; Charlie Cheswick, who is prone to childish tantrums; delusional Martini; the well-educated, paranoid Dale Harding; belligerent Max Taber; epileptic Jim Sefelt; and “Chief” Bromden, a tall Native American believed to be deaf and mute. Ratched soon sees McMurphy’s lively, rebellious presence to be a threat to her authority, confiscating the patients’ cigarettes and rationing them. During his time in the ward, McMurphy gets into a battle of wits with Ratched. He steals a hospital bus, escaping with several patients to go on a fishing trip, encouraging his friends to become more self-confident.

text: McMurphy learns his sentence may become indefinite, and he makes plans to escape, exhorting Chief to throw a hydrotherapy cart through a window. He, Chief, and Cheswick get into a fight with the orderlies after the latter becomes agitated over his stolen cigarettes. Ratched sends them to the “shock shop,” and McMurphy discovers Chief can actually speak, feigning illness to avoid engaging with anyone. After being subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, McMurphy returns to the ward pretending to have brain damage, but reveals the treatment has charged him up even more. McMurphy and Chief make plans to escape, but decide to throw a secret Christmas party for their friends after Ratched leaves for the night.

text: McMurphy sneaks two women, Candy and Rose, into the ward and bribes the night guard. After a night of partying, McMurphy and Chief prepare to escape, inviting Billy to come with them. He refuses, not ready to leave the hospital. McMurphy instead convinces him to have sex with Candy. Ratched arrives in the morning to find the ward in disarray and most of the patients unconscious. She discovers Billy and Candy together, the former now free of his stutter, until Ratched threatens to inform his mother about his escapade. Billy is overwhelmed with fear and locks himself in the doctor’s office and commits suicide. The enraged McMurphy chokes Ratched, before being knocked out by an orderly.

text: Ratched comes back with a neck brace and a scratchy voice. Rumors spread that McMurphy escaped rather than be taken “upstairs.” Later that night, Chief sees McMurphy being returned to his bed. He discovers McMurphy has lobotomy scars on his forehead, and smothers his friend with a pillow. Chief finally throws the hydrotherapy cart through the window and escapes into the night, cheered on by Taber.

text: Cast[edit]

text:
Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy
Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched
Will Sampson as "Chief" Bromden
William Redfield as Dale Harding
Brad Dourif as Billy Bibbit
Sydney Lassick as Charlie Cheswick
Christopher Lloyd as Max Taber
Danny DeVito as Martini
Dean Brooks as Dr. John Spivey
William Duell as Jim Sefelt
Vincent Schiavelli as Bruce Frederickson
Michael Berryman as Ellis
Nathan George as Attendant Washington
Marya Small as Candy
Scatman Crothers as Orderly Turkle
Louisa Moritz as Rose
Peter Brocco as Col. Matterson

text: Production[edit]

text: Actor Kirk Douglas—who had originated the role of McMurphy in the 1963–64 Broadway stage version of the Ken Kesey novel—had purchased the film rights to the story and tried for a decade to bring it to the big screen, but was unable to find a studio willing to make it with him. Eventually, he gave the rights to his son Michael Douglas, who succeeded in getting the film produced–but the elder Douglas, by then nearly 60, was considered too old for the McMurphy role, which ultimately went to 38-year old Jack Nicholson.

text: Douglas bought in Saul Zaentz as co-producer.[4]

text: The film's first screenwriter, Lawrence Hauben, introduced Douglas to the work of Miloš Forman, whose 1967 Czechoslovak film The Firemen's Ball had the sort of qualities they were looking for. Forman flew to California and went through the script page by page and outlined what he would do, in contrast with other directors who had been approached who were less than forthcoming. Saul Zaentz, a voracious reader, felt an affinity with Kesey, and so after Hauben's first attempt he asked Kesey to write the screenplay, and promised him a piece of the action, but it didn’t work out and ended in a financial dispute.[4]

text: Hal Ashby, who had been an early consideration for director, suggested Jack Nicholson for the role of McMurphy. Production was delayed for about six months because of Nicholson’s schedule. However, Douglas later felt that this ended up as a blessing as it gave more time to get the ensemble right.[4]

text: Casting[edit]

text: Danny DeVito, who was Douglas's oldest friend, was the first to be cast as he had played Martini, one of the patients, in the 1971 off-Broadway production. Douglas found Will Sampson, who played Chief Bromden, through a used car dealer that Douglas was sitting next to on an aircraft. Douglas had told him that they were looking for a big guy to play the chief. He sold a lot of cars to Native Americans and six months later rang Douglas to say: “the biggest sonofabitch Indian came in the other day!”[4]

text: Miloš Forman had considered Shelley Duvall for the role of Candy. While screening Thieves Like Us (1974) to see if she was right for the role, he became interested in Louise Fletcher, who had a supporting role, for the role of Nurse Ratched. A mutual acquaintance, the casting director Fred Roos, had already mentioned her name as a possibility. Even so it took four or five meetings, over a year, (during which the role was offered to other actresses) for Fletcher to secure the role of Nurse Ratched. Her final audition was late in 1974, with Forman, Zaentz and Douglas. The day after Christmas, her agent called to say she was expected at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem on 4 January to begin rehearsals.[5]

text: Rehearsals[edit]

text: Prior to commencement of filming a week of rehearsals started on 4 January 1975 in Oregon, during which the actors watched the patients in their daily routine and at group therapy. Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher also witnessed electroconvulsive therapy on a patient.[4]

text: Filming[edit]

text: Other than Nicholson, the rest of the cast were working for scale, or a little above that.[clarification needed] Fletcher worked for 11 weeks and made $10,000 before taxes.[5]

text: Filming began in January 1975 and concluded approximately three months later, and was shot on location in Salem, Oregon and the surrounding area, as well as on the Oregon coast.[6][7][8]

text: The producers decided to shoot the film in the Oregon State Hospital, an actual mental hospital, as this was also the setting of the novel.[9] The hospital’s director, Dean Brooks, was supportive of the filming and eventually ended up playing the character of Dr. John Spivey in the film. Brooks identified a patient for each of the actors to shadow, and some of the cast even slept on the wards at night. He also wanted to incorporate his patients into the crew, to which the producers agreed. Douglas recalls that it wasn't until later that he found out that many of them were criminally insane.[4]

text: As Forman didn't allow the actors to see the day’s filming, this led to the cast losing confidence in him, while Nicholson also began to wonder about his performance. Douglas convinced Forman to show Nicholson something, which he did, and restored the actor's confidence.[4]

text: Haskell Wexler was fired as cinematographer and replaced by Bill Butler. Wexler believed his dismissal was due to his concurrent work on the documentary Underground, in which the radical terrorist group The Weather Underground were being interviewed while hiding from the law. However, Miloš Forman said he had terminated Wexler over artistic differences. Both Wexler and Butler received Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, though Wexler said there was "only about a minute or two minutes in that film I didn't shoot.”[10]

text: According to Butler, Jack Nicholson refused to speak to Forman: "...[Jack] never talked to Miloš at all, he only talked to me."[1]

text: Filming went over the initial budget of $2m and over-schedule, but Saul Zaentz, who was personally financing the movie, was able to fund this by borrowing against his company, Fantasy Records. The movie cost in total $4.4m to make.[4]

text: Reception[edit]

text: The film was met with overwhelming critical acclaim; Roger Ebert said "Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a film so good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance."[11] Ebert would later put the film on his "Great Movies" list.[12] A.D. Murphy of Variety wrote a mixed review as well,[13] as did Vincent Canby: writing in The New York Times, Canby called the film "a comedy that can't quite support its tragic conclusion, which is too schematic to be honestly moving, but it is acted with such a sense of life that one responds to its demonstration of humanity if not to its programmed metaphors."[14]

text: The film opens with original music by composer Jack Nitzsche, featuring an eerie bowed saw (performed by Robert Armstrong) and wine glasses. Commenting on the score, reviewer Steven McDonald has said, "The edgy nature of the film extends into the score, giving it a profoundly disturbing feel at times -- even when it appears to be relatively normal. The music has a tendency to always be a little off-kilter, and from time to time it tilts completely over into a strange little world of its own ..."[15]

text: The film went on to win the "Big Five" Academy Awards at the 48th Oscar ceremony. These include the Best Actor for Jack Nicholson, Best Actress for Louise Fletcher, Best Direction for Forman, Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman. The film currently has a 95% "Certified Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 9/10.[16] Its consensus states "The onscreen battle between Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher serves as a personal microcosm of the culture wars of the 1970s -- and testament to the director's vision that the film retains its power more than three decades later."

text: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is considered to be one of the greatest American films. Ken Kesey participated in the early stages of script development, but withdrew after creative differences with the producers over casting and narrative point of view; ultimately he filed suit against the production and won a settlement.[17] Kesey himself claimed never to have seen the movie, but said he disliked what he knew of it,[18] a fact confirmed by Chuck Palahniuk who wrote, "The first time I heard this story, it was through the movie starring Jack Nicholson. A movie that Kesey once told me he disliked."[19]

text: In 1993, this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.[20]

text: Awards and honors[edit]

text:
Award
Category
Nominee
Result

Academy Award
Academy Award for Best Picture
Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz
Won

Academy Award for Best Director
Miloš Forman
Won

Academy Award for Best Actor
Jack Nicholson
Won

Academy Award for Best Actress
Louise Fletcher
Won

Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay
Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman
Won

Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
Brad Dourif
Nominated

Academy Award for Best Cinematography
Haskell Wexler and Bill Butler
Nominated

Academy Award for Film Editing
Richard Chew, Lyzee Klingman and Sheldon Kahn
Nominated

Academy Award for Original Music Score
Jack Nitzsche
Nominated

Golden Globe Award
Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama
Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz
Won

Golden Globe Award for Best Director - Motion Picture
Miloš Forman
Won

Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
Jack Nicholson
Won

Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama
Louise Fletcher
Won

Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay
Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman
Won

Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year - Actor
Brad Dourif
Won

BAFTA Award
BAFTA Award for Best Film
Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz
Won

BAFTA Award for Best Direction
Miloš Forman
Won

BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role
Jack Nicholson
Won

BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role
Louise Fletcher
Won

BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Brad Dourif
Won

BAFTA Award for Best Editing
Richard Chew, Lynzee Klingman and Sheldon Kahn
Won

BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography
Haskell Wexler and Bill Butler
Nominated

BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay
Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman
Nominated

text: Others[edit]

text: American Film Institute

text:
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies — #20
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains:

Nurse Ratched — #5 Villain
Randle Patrick McMurphy — Nominated Hero[21]

AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers — #17
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) — #33


document_title: Bhagavad Gita

question_text: who translated bhagavad gita from sanskrit to marathi

question_tokens: who translated bhagavad gita from sanskrit to marathi

root

text: Bhagavad Gita

text: Composition and significance[edit]

text: Authorship[edit]

text: The epic Mahabharata is traditionally ascribed to the Sage Vyasa; the Bhagavad Gita, being a part of the Mahabharata's Bhishma Parva, is also ascribed to him.[14]

tag: p

text: Date of composition[edit]

text: Theories on the date of composition of the Gita vary considerably. Scholars accept dates from the fifth century to the second century BCE as the probable range. Professor Jeaneane Fowler, in her commentary on the Gita, considers second century BCE to be the likely date of composition.[15] Kashi Nath Upadhyaya, a Gita scholar, on the basis of the estimated dates of Mahabharata, Brahma sutras, and other independent sources, concludes that the Bhagavad Gita was composed in the fifth or fourth century BCE.[16]

text: It is generally agreed that, "Unlike the Vedas, which have to be preserved letter-perfect, the Gita was a popular work whose reciters would inevitably conform to changes in language and style", so the earliest "surviving" components of this dynamic text are believed to be no older than the earliest "external" references we have to the Mahabharata epic, which may include an allusion in Panini's fourth century BCE grammar. It is estimated that the text probably reached something of a "final form" by the early Gupta period (about the 4th century CE). The actual dates of composition of the Gita remain unresolved.[14]

text: Bhagavad Gita in ancient sanskrit literature[edit]

text: There is no reference to the Bhagavad Gita in Buddhist literature, the Tripitaka. The Buddha refers to 3 Vedas rather than 4 Vedas.

text: Hindu synthesis and smriti[edit]

text: Due to its presence in the Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita is classified as a Smriti text or "that which is remembered".[note 2] The smriti texts of the period between 200 BCE and 100 CE belong to the emerging "Hindu Synthesis", proclaiming the authority of the Vedas while integrating various Indian traditions and religions. Acceptance of the Vedas became a central criterion for defining Hinduism over and against the heterodoxies, which rejected the Vedas.[17]

text: The so-called "Hindu Synthesis" emerged during the early Classical period (200 BCE – 300 CE) of Hinduism.[17][8][18] According to Alf Hiltebeitel, a period of consolidation in the development of Hinduism took place between the time of the late Vedic Upanishad (ca. 500 BCE) and the period of the rise of the Guptas (ca. 320–467 CE) which he calls the "Hindu Synthesis", "Brahmanic Synthesis", or "Orthodox Synthesis".[17] It developed in interaction with other religions and peoples:

text: The emerging self-definitions of Hinduism were forged in the context of continuous interaction with heterodox religions (Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas) throughout this whole period, and with foreign people (Yavanas, or Greeks; Sakas, or Scythians; Pahlavas, or Parthians; and Kusanas, or Kushans) from the third phase on [between the Mauryan empire and the rise of the Guptas].[17]

text: The Bhagavad Gita is the sealing achievement of this Hindu Synthesis, incorporating various religious traditions.[17][10][8][web 1][9] According to Hiltebeitel, Bhakti forms an essential ingredient of this synthesis, which incorporates Bhakti into Vedanta.[17] According to Deutsch and Dalvi, the Bhagavad Gita attempts "to forge a harmony"[19] between different strands of Indian thought: jnana, dharma and bhakti.[10] Deutsch and Dalvi note that the authors of the Bhagavad Gita "must have seen the appeal of the soteriologies both of the "heterodox" traditions of Buddhism and Jainism and of the more "orthodox" ones of Samkhya and Yoga",[7] while the Brahmanic tradition emphasised "the significance of dharma as the instrument of goodness".[7] Scheepers mentions the Bhagavat Gita as a Brahmanical text which uses the shramanic and Yogic terminology to spread the Brahmanic idea of living according to one's duty or dharma, in contrast to the yogic ideal of liberation from the workings of karma.[8] According to Basham,

text: The Bhagavadgita combines many different elements from Samkhya and Vedanta philosophy. In matters of religion, its important contribution was the new emphasis placed on devotion, which has since remained a central path in Hinduism. In addition, the popular theism expressed elsewhere in the Mahabharata and the transcendentalism of the Upanishads converge, and a God of personal characteristics is identified with the brahman of the Vedic tradition. The Bhagavadgita thus gives a typology of the three dominant trends of Indian religion: dharma-based householder life, enlightenment-based renunciation, and devotion-based theism.[web 1]

text: Bhagavad Gita as a synthesis:

text: The Bhagavadgita may be treated as a great synthesis of the ideas of the impersonal spiritual monism with personalistic monotheism, of the yoga of action with the yoga of transcendence of action, and these again with yogas of devotion and knowledge.[9]

text: The influence of the Bhagavad Gita was such, that its synthesis was adapted to and incorporated into specific Indian traditions. Nicholson mentions the Shiva Gita as an adaptation of the Vishnu-oriented Bhagavat Gita into Shiva-oriented terminology,[20] and the Isvara Gita as borrowing entire verses from the Krishna-oriented Bhagavad Gita and placing them into a new Shiva-oriented context.[21]

text: Status[edit]

text: The Bhagavad Gita is part of the Prasthanatrayi, which also includes the Upanishads and Brahma sutras. These are the key texts for the Vedanta,[22][23][24] which interprets these texts to give a unified meaning. Advaita Vedanta sees the non-dualism of Atman and Brahman as its essence,[12] whereas Bhedabheda and Vishishtadvaita see Atman and Brahman as both different and non-different, and Dvaita sees them as different. In recent times the Advaita interpretation has gained worldwide popularity, due to the Neo-Vedanta of Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan, while the Achintya Bheda Abheda interpretation has gained worldwide popularity via the Hare Krishnas, a branch of Gaudiya Vaishnavism.[25]

text: Although early Vedanta gives an interpretation of the sruti texts of the Upanishads, and its main commentary the Brahman Sutras, the popularity of the Bhagavad Gita was such that it could not be neglected.[6] It is referred to in the Brahman Sutras, and Shankara, Bhaskara and Ramanuja all three wrote commentaries on it.[6] The Bhagavad Gita is different from the Upanishads in format and content, and accessible to all, in contrast to the sruti, which are only to be read and heard by the higher castes.[6]

text: Some branches of Hinduism give it the status of an Upanishad, and consider it to be a Śruti or "revealed text".[26][27] According to Pandit, who gives a modern-orthodox interpretation of Hinduism, "since the Bhagavad Gita represents a summary of the Upanishadic teachings, it is sometimes called 'the Upanishad of the Upanishads'."[28]

text: As an explanation of the Purushamedha[edit]

text: The Bhagavad Gita is a Bhagavata explanation of the Purusha Sukta and the Purushamedha Srauta yajna described in the Satapatha Brahmana.[11] Chapters 7 and 8 of the Bhagavad Gita describe the relationship between teacher and disciple, where the teacher is viewed as the absolute person, Purusa Narayana.[11] In Chapters 10 and 11 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna begins to instruct Arjuna about the directions of space-time within himself reflecting what is written in the Satapatha Brahmana and Purusa Sukta.[11] The vision of Krishna in his universal form shows the self-devouring nature of the absolute person, as described in the Satapatha Brahmana and Purusa Sukta.[11] Chapters 12 describes the two paths one chooses after one completes the Purushamedha yajna i.e. become a renunciate or remain as a householder.[11] Chapter 14 is the highest teaching within the Bhagavad Gita, the knowledge to achieve the same state as Purusa Narayana, which is the goal of the Purushamedha.[29]

text: Content[edit]

text: Narrative[edit]

text: In the epic Mahabharata, after Sanjaya—counsellor of the Kuru king Dhritarashtra—returns from the battlefield to announce the death of Bhishma, he begins recounting the details of the Mahabharata war. Bhagavad Gita forms the content of this recollection.[30] The Gita begins before the start of the climactic Kurukshetra War, where the Pandava prince Arjuna is filled with doubt on the battlefield. Realising that his enemies are his own relatives, beloved friends, and revered teachers, he turns to his charioteer and guide, God Incarnate Lord Shri Krishna, for advice. Responding to Arjuna's confusion and moral dilemma, Krishna explains to Arjuna his duties as a warrior and prince, elaborating on a variety of philosophical concepts.[31]

text: Characters[edit]

text:
Arjuna, one of the Pandavas
Lord Shri Krishna, Arjuna's charioteer and guru who was actually an incarnation of Lord Vishnu
Sanjaya, counselor of the Kuru king Dhritarashtra
Dhritarashtra, Kuru king.[citation needed]

tag: ul

text: Overview of chapters[edit]

text: Bhagavad Gita comprises 18 chapters (section 25 to 42)[32][web 2] in the Bhishma Parva of the epic Mahabharata and consists of 700 verses.[33] Because of differences in recensions, the verses of the Gita may be numbered in the full text of the Mahabharata as chapters 6.25–42 or as chapters 6.23–40.[web 3] According to the recension of the Gita commented on by Adi Shankara, a prominent philosopher of the Vedanta school, the number of verses is 700, but there is evidence to show that old manuscripts had 745 verses.[34] The verses themselves, composed with similes and metaphors, are poetic in nature. The verses mostly employ the range and style of the Sanskrit Anustubh metre (chhandas), and in a few expressive verses the Tristubh metre is used.[35]

text: The Sanskrit editions of the Gita name each chapter as a particular form of yoga. However, these chapter titles do not appear in the Sanskrit text of the Mahabharata.[web 3] Swami Chidbhavananda explains that each of the eighteen chapters is designated as a separate yoga because each chapter, like yoga, "trains the body and the mind". He labels the first chapter "Arjuna Vishada Yogam" or the "Yoga of Arjuna's Dejection".[36] Sir Edwin Arnold translates this chapter as "The Distress of Arjuna"[37]

text:
Prathama adhyaya[40] (The Distress of Arjuna[37] contains 46 verses): Arjuna has requested Krishna to move his chariot between the two armies. His growing dejection is described as he fears losing friends and relatives as a consequence of war.[web 5]
Sankhya yoga (The Book of Doctrines[37] contains 72 verses): After asking Krishna for help, Arjuna is instructed into various subjects such as, Karma yoga, Gyaana yoga, Sankhya yoga, Buddhi yoga and the immortal nature of the soul. Sankhya here refers to one of six orthodox schools of the Hindu Philosophy. This chapter is often considered the summary of the entire Bhagavad Gita.[web 6]
Karma yoga (Virtue in Work[37] or Virtue Of Actions contains 43 verses): Krishna explains how Karma yoga, i.e. performance of prescribed duties, but without attachment to results, is the appropriate course of action for Arjuna.[web 7]
Gyaana–Karma-Sanyasa yoga (The Religion of Knowledge[37] contains 42 verses): Krishna reveals that he has lived through many births, always teaching yoga for the protection of the pious and the destruction of the impious and stresses the importance of accepting a guru.[web 8]
Karma–Sanyasa yoga (Religion by Renouncing Fruits of Works[37] contains 29 verses): Arjuna asks Krishna if it is better to forgo action or to act ("renunciation or discipline of action").[41] Krishna answers that both are ways to the same goal,[web 9] but that acting in Karma yoga is superior.
Dhyan yoga or Atmasanyam yoga (Religion by Self-Restraint[37] contains 47 verses): Krishna describes the Ashtanga yoga. He further elucidates the difficulties of the mind and the techniques by which mastery of the mind might be gained.[web 10]
Gyaana–ViGyaana yoga (Religion by Discernment[37] contains 30 verses): Krishna describes the absolute reality and its illusory energy Maya.[web 11]
Aksara–Brahma yoga (Religion by Devotion to the One Supreme God[37] contains 28 verses): This chapter contains eschatology of the Bhagavad Gita. Importance of the last thought before death, differences between material and spiritual worlds, and light and dark paths that a soul takes after death are described.[web 12]
Raja–Vidya–Raja–Guhya yoga (Religion by the Kingly Knowledge and the Kingly Mystery[37] contains 34 verses): Krishna explains how His eternal energy pervades, creates, preserves, and destroys the entire universe.[web 13] According to theologian Christopher Southgate, verses of this chapter of the Gita are panentheistic,[42] while German physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein deems the work pandeistic.[43]
Vibhuti–Vistara–yoga (Religion by the Heavenly Perfections[37] contains 42 verses): Krishna is described as the ultimate cause of all material and spiritual existence. Arjuna accepts Krishna as the Supreme Being, quoting great sages who have also done so.[web 14]
Visvarupa–Darsana yoga (The Manifesting of the One and Manifold[37] contains 55 verses): On Arjuna's request, Krishna displays his "universal form" (Viśvarūpa),[web 15] a theophany of a being facing every way and emitting the radiance of a thousand suns, containing all other beings and material in existence.
Bhakti yoga (The Religion of Faith[37] contains 20 verses): In this chapter Krishna glorifies the path of devotion to God. Krishna describes the process of devotional service (Bhakti yoga). He also explains different forms of spiritual disciplines.[web 16]
Ksetra–Ksetrajna Vibhaga yoga (Religion by Separation of Matter and Spirit[37] contains 35 verses): The difference between transient perishable physical body and the immutable eternal soul is described. The difference between individual consciousness and universal consciousness is also made clear.[web 17]
Gunatraya–Vibhaga yoga (Religion by Separation from the Qualities[37] contains 27 verses): Krishna explains the three modes (gunas) of material nature pertaining to goodness, passion, and nescience. Their causes, characteristics, and influence on a living entity are also described.[web 18]
Purusottama yoga (Religion by Attaining the Supreme[37] contains 20 verses): Krishna identifies the transcendental characteristics of God such as, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.[web 19] Krishna also describes a symbolic tree (representing material existence), which has its roots in the heavens and its foliage on earth. Krishna explains that this tree should be felled with the "axe of detachment", after which one can go beyond to his supreme abode.
Daivasura–Sampad–Vibhaga yoga (The Separateness of the Divine and Undivine[37] contains 24 verses): Krishna identifies the human traits of the divine and the demonic natures. He counsels that to attain the supreme destination one must give up lust, anger, greed, and discern between right and wrong action by discernment through Buddhi and evidence from the scriptures.[web 20]
Sraddhatraya-Vibhaga yoga (Religion by the Threefold Kinds of Faith[37] contains 28 verses): Krishna qualifies the three divisions of faith, thoughts, deeds, and even eating habits corresponding to the three modes (gunas).[web 21]
Moksha–Sanyasa yoga (Religion by Deliverance and Renunciation[37] contains 78 verses): In this chapter, the conclusions of previous seventeen chapters are summed up. Krishna asks Arjuna to abandon all forms of dharma and simply surrender unto him and describes this as the ultimate perfection of life.[web 22]

tag: ol

text: Themes[edit]

text: This section contains Indic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks or boxes, misplaced vowels or missing conjuncts instead of Indic text.

tag: table

text: Dharma[edit]

text: The term dharma has a number of meanings.[44] Fundamentally, it means "what is right".[44] Early in the text, responding to Arjuna's despondency, Krishna asks him to follow his swadharma,[45][note 3] "the dharma that belongs to a particular man (Arjuna) as a member of a particular varna, (i.e., the kshatriya)."[45] Many traditional followers accept and believe that every man is unique in nature(svabhava) and hence svadharma for each and every individual is also unique and must be followed strictly with sole bhakthi and shraddha.[citation needed]

text: According to Vivekananda:

text: If one reads this one Shloka, one gets all the merits of reading the entire Gita; for in this one Shloka lies imbedded the whole Message of the Gita."[46]

text: क्लैब्यं मा स्म गमः पार्थ नैतत्त्वय्युपपद्यते । क्षुद्रं हृदयदौर्बल्यं त्यक्त्वोत्तिष्ठ परंतप॥

text: klaibhyaṁ mā sma gamaḥ pārtha naitattvayyupapadyate, kṣudraṁ hṛdayadaurbalyaṁ tyaktvottiṣṭha paraṁtapa.

text: Do not yield to unmanliness, O son of Prithā. It does not become you. Shake off this base faint-heartedness and arise, O scorcher of enemies! (2.3)

text: Dharma and heroism[edit]

text: The Bhagavad Gita is set in the narrative frame of the Mahabharata, which values heroism, "energy, dedication and self-sacrifice",[4] as the dharma, "holy duty"[47] of the Kshatriya (Warrior).[47][4][48] Axel Michaels in his book Hinduism: Past and Present writes that in the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is "exhorted by his charioteer, Kṛiṣhṇa, among others, to stop hesitating and fulfil his Kṣatriya (warrior) duty as a warrior and kill."[4]

text: According to Malinar, the dispute between the two parties in the Mahabharata centres on the question how to define "the law of heroism".[49][note 4] Malinar gives a description of the dharma of a Kshatriya (warrior) based on the Udyogaparvan, the fifth book of the Mahabharata:

text: This duty consists first of all in standing one's ground and fighting for status. The main duty of a warrior is never to submit to anybody. A warrior must resist any impulse to self-preservation that would make him avoid a fight. In brief, he ought to be a man (puruso bhava; cf. 5.157.6; 13;15). Some of the most vigorous formulations of what called the "heart" or the "essence" of heroism (ksatrahrdaya) come from the ladies of the family. They are shown most unforgiving with regard to the humiliations they have gone through, the loss of their status and honour, not to speak of the shame of having a weak man in the house, whether husband, son or brother.[5][note 5]

text: Michaels defines heroism as "power assimilated with interest in salvation".[50] According to Michaels:

text: Even though the frame story of the Mahabharata is rather simple, the epic has an outstanding significance for Hindu heroism. The heroism of the Pandavas, the ideals of honor and courage in battle, are constant sources of treatises in which it is not sacrifice, renunciation of the world, or erudition that is valued, but energy, dedication and self-sacrifice. The Bhagavad Gita, inserted in the sixth book (Bhishmaparvan), and probably completed in the second century CE, is such a text, that is, a philosophical and theistic treatise, with which the Pandava is exhorted by his charioteer, Krishna, among others, to stop hesitating and fulfill his Kṣatriya (warrior) duty as a warrior and kill.[4]

text: According to Malinar, "Arjuna's crisis and some of the arguments put forward to call him to action are connected to the debates on war and peace in the UdP [Udyoga Parva]".[51] According to Malinar, the UdP emphasises that one must put up with fate and, the BhG personalises the surrender one's personal interests to the power of destiny by "propagating the view that accepting and enacting the fatal course of events is an act of devotion to this god [Krsna] and his cause."[51]

text: Modern interpretations of dharma[edit]

text: Svadharma and svabhava[edit]

text: The eighteenth chapter of the Gita examines the relationship between svadharma and svabhava.[note 6][52] This chapter uses the gunas of Shankya philosophy to present a series of typologies, and uses the same term to characterise the specific activities of the four varnas, which are distinguished by the "gunas proceeding from their nature."[52]

text: Aurobindo modernises the concept of dharma and svabhava by internalising it, away from the social order and its duties towards one's personal capacities, which leads to a radical individualism,[53] "finding the fulfilment of the purpose of existence in the individual alone."[53] He deduced from the Gita the doctrine that "the functions of a man ought to be determined by his natural turn, gift, and capacities",[53] that the individual should "develop freely"[53] and thereby would be best able to serve society.[53]

text: Gandhi's view differed from Aurobindo's view.[54] He recognised in the concept of swadharma his idea of swadeshi, the idea that "man owes his service above all to those who are nearest to him by birth and situation."[54] To him, swadeshi was "swadharma applied to one's immediate environment."[55]

text: The Field of Dharma[edit]

text: The first reference to dharma in the Bhagavad Gita occurs in its first verse, where Dhritarashtra refers to the Kurukshetra, the location of the battlefield, as the Field of Dharma, "The Field of Righteousness or Truth".[44] According to Fowler, dharma in this verse may refer to the sanatana dharma, "what Hindus understand as their religion, for it is a term that encompasses wide aspects of religious and traditional thought and is more readily used for ""religion".[44] Therefore, 'Field of action' implies the field of righteousness, where truth will eventually triumph.[44]

text: "The Field of Dharma" is also called the "Field of action" by Sri Aurobindo, a freedom fighter and philosopher.[44] Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, a philosopher and the second president of India, saw "The Field of Dharma" as the world (Bhavsagar), which is a "battleground for moral struggle".[56]

text: Allegory of war[edit]

text: Unlike any other religious scripture, the Bhagavad Gita broadcasts its message in the centre of the battlefield.[57] The choice of such an unholy ambience for the delivery of a philosophical discourse has been an enigma to many commentators.[web 25] Several modern Indian writers have interpreted the battlefield setting as an allegory of "the war within".[58]

text: Eknath Easwaran writes that the Gita's subject is "the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious",[59] and that "The language of battle is often found in the scriptures, for it conveys the strenuous, long, drawn-out campaign we must wage to free ourselves from the tyranny of the ego, the cause of all our suffering and sorrow."[60]

text: Swami Nikhilananda, takes Arjuna as an allegory of Ātman, Krishna as an allegory of Brahman, Arjuna's chariot as the body, and Dhritarashtra as the ignorance filled mind.[note 7]

text: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in his commentary on the Gita,[61] interprets the battle as "an allegory in which the battlefield is the soul and Arjuna, man's higher impulses struggling against evil".[62]

text: Swami Vivekananda also emphasised that the first discourse in the Gita related to the war could be taken allegorically.[63] Vivekananda further remarked,

text: This Kurukshetra War is only an allegory. When we sum up its esoteric significance, it means the war which is constantly going on within man between the tendencies of good and evil.[64]

text: In Aurobindo's view, Krishna was a historical figure, but his significance in the Gita is as a "symbol of the divine dealings with humanity",[65] while Arjuna typifies a "struggling human soul".[66] However, Aurobindo rejected the interpretation that the Gita, and the Mahabharata by extension, is "an allegory of the inner life, and has nothing to do with our outward human life and actions":[66]

text: ... That is a view which the general character and the actual language of the epic does not justify and, if pressed, would turn the straightforward philosophical language of the Gita into a constant, laborious and somewhat puerile mystification ... the Gita is written in plain terms and professes to solve the great ethical and spiritual difficulties which the life of man raises, and it will not do to go behind this plain language and thought and wrest them to the service of our fancy. But there is this much of truth in the view, that the setting of the doctrine though not symbolical, is certainly typical.[66]

text: Swami Chinmayananda writes:

text: Here in the Bhagavad Gita, we find a practical handbook of instruction on how best we can re-organise our inner ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in our everyday life and draw from ourselves a larger gush of productivity to enrich the life around us, and to emblazon the subjective life within us.[67]

text: Promotion of just war and duty[edit]

text: Other scholars such as Steven Rosen, Laurie L. Patton and Stephen Mitchell have seen in the Gita a religious defense of the warrior class's (Kshatriya Varna) duty (svadharma), which is to conduct combat and war with courage and do not see this as only an allegorical teaching, but also a real defense of just war.[68][69]

text: Indian independence leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak saw the Gita as a text which defended war when necessary and used it to promote war against the British Empire. Lajpat Rai wrote an article on the "Message of the Bhagavad Gita". He saw the main message as the bravery and courage of Arjuna to fight as a warrior.[70] Bal Gangadhar Tilak saw the Gita as defending killing when necessary for the betterment of society, such as, for example, the killing of Afzal Khan.[70]

text: According to J. N. Farquhar:

text: "Even the Gita was used to teach murder. Lies, deceit, murder, everything, it was argued, may be rightly used. How far the leaders really believed this teaching no man can say; but the younger men got filled with it, and many were only too sincere."[71]

text: Moksha: Liberation[edit]

text: Liberation or moksha in Vedanta philosophy is not something that can be acquired or reached. Ātman (Soul), the goal of moksha, is something that is always present as the essence of the self, and can be revealed by deep intuitive knowledge. While the Upanishads largely uphold such a monistic viewpoint of liberation, the Bhagavad Gita also accommodates the dualistic and theistic aspects of moksha. The Gita, while occasionally hinting at impersonal Brahman as the goal, revolves around the relationship between the Self and a personal God or Saguna Brahman. A synthesis of knowledge, devotion, and desireless action is given as a prescription for Arjuna's despondence; the same combination is suggested as a way to moksha.[72] Winthrop Sargeant further explains, "In the model presented by the Bhagavad Gītā, every aspect of life is in fact a way of salvation."[73]

text: Yoga[edit]

text: Yoga in the Bhagavad Gita refers to the skill of union with the ultimate reality or the Absolute.[74] In his commentary, Zaehner says that the root meaning of yoga is "yoking" or "preparation"; he proposes the basic meaning "spiritual exercise", which conveys the various nuances in the best way.[75]

text: Sivananda's commentary regards the eighteen chapters of the Bhagavad Gita as having a progressive order, by which Krishna leads "Arjuna up the ladder of Yoga from one rung to another."[76] The influential commentator Madhusudana Sarasvati divided the Gita's eighteen chapters into three sections of six chapters each. Swami Gambhirananda characterises Madhusudana Sarasvati's system as a successive approach in which Karma yoga leads to Bhakti yoga, which in turn leads to Gyaana yoga:[77][78]

text:
Chapters 1–6 = Karma yoga, the means to the final goal
Chapters 7–12 = Bhakti yoga or devotion
Chapters 13–18 = Gyaana yoga or knowledge, the goal itself

text: Karma yoga[edit]

text: As noted by various commentators, the Bhagavad Gita offers a practical approach to liberation in the form of Karma yoga. The path of Karma yoga upholds the necessity of action. However, this action is to be undertaken without any attachment to the work or desire for results. Bhagavad Gita terms this "inaction in action and action in inaction (4.18)". The concept of such detached action is also called Nishkam Karma, a term not used in the Gita.[79] Lord Krishna, in the following verses, elaborates on the role actions, performed without desire and attachment, play in attaining freedom from material bondage and transmigration:

text: To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction

text: Fixed in yoga, do thy work, O Winner of wealth (Arjuna), abandoning attachment, with an even mind in success and failure, for evenness of mind is called yoga. (2.47–8)[80]

text: The yogīs, abandoning attachment, act with body, mind, intelligence, and even with the senses, only for the purpose of purification. (5.11)[web 26]

text: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi writes, "The object of the Gita appears to me to be that of showing the most excellent way to attain self-realization", and this can be achieved by selfless action, "By desireless action; by renouncing fruits of action; by dedicating all activities to God, i.e., by surrendering oneself to Him body and soul." Gandhi called the Gita "The Gospel of Selfless Action".[81] To achieve true liberation, it is important to control all mental desires and tendencies to enjoy sense pleasures. The following verses illustrate this:[82]

text: When a man dwells in his mind on the object of sense, attachment to them is produced. From attachment springs desire and from desire comes anger.

text: From anger arises bewilderment, from bewilderment loss of memory; and from loss of memory, the destruction of intelligence and from the destruction of intelligence he perishes. (2.62–3)[82]

text: Bhakti yoga[edit]

text: The introduction to chapter seven of the Bhagavad Gita explains bhakti as a mode of worship which consists of unceasing and loving remembrance of God. Faith (Śraddhā) and total surrender to a chosen God (Ishta-deva) are considered to be important aspects of bhakti.[83] Theologian Catherine Cornille writes, "The text [of the Gita] offers a survey of the different possible disciplines for attaining liberation through knowledge (Gyaana), action (karma), and loving devotion to God (bhakti), focusing on the latter as both the easiest and the highest path to salvation."[84] M. R. Sampatkumaran, a Bhagavad Gita scholar, explains in his overview of Ramanuja's commentary on the Gita, "The point is that mere knowledge of the scriptures cannot lead to final release. Devotion, meditation, and worship are essential."[85] Ramakrishna believed that the essential message of the Gita could be obtained by repeating the word Gita several times,[86] "'Gita, Gita, Gita', you begin, but then find yourself saying 'ta-Gi, ta-Gi, ta-Gi'. Tagi means one who has renounced everything for God." In the following verses, Krishna elucidates the importance of bhakti:

text: And of all yogins, he who full of faith worships Me, with his inner self abiding in Me, him, I hold to be the most attuned (to me in Yoga). (6.47)[87]

text: For one who worships Me, giving up all his activities unto Me and being devoted to Me without deviation, engaged in devotional service and always meditating upon Me, who has fixed his mind upon Me, O son of Pṛthā, for him I am the swift deliverer from the ocean of birth and death. (12.6–7)[web 27]

text: Radhakrishnan writes that the verse 11.55 is "the essence of bhakti" and the "substance of the whole teaching of the Gita":[88]

text: Those who make me the supreme goal of all their work and act without selfish attachment, who devote themselves to me completely and are free from ill will for any creature, enter into me.(11.55)[89]

text: Jnana yoga[edit]

text: Jnana yoga is the path of wisdom, knowledge, and direct experience of Brahman as the ultimate reality. The path renounces both desires and actions, and is therefore depicted as being steep and very difficult in the Bhagavad Gita. This path is often associated with the non-dualistic Vedantic belief of the identity of the Ātman with the Brahman. For the followers of this path, the realisation of the identity of Ātman and Brahman is held as the key to liberation.[90]

text: When a sensible man ceases to see different identities, which are due to different material bodies, he attains to the Brahman conception. Thus he sees that beings are expanded everywhere. (13.31)[web 28]

text: One who knowingly sees this difference between the body and the owner of the body and can understand the process of liberation from this bondage, also attains to the supreme goal. (13.35)[web 29]

text: Commentaries and translations[edit]

text: The Bhagavad Gita was first translated into English in the year 1785, by Charles Wilkins on the orders of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, with special interest shown by Warren Hastings, the then Governor General of India. This edition had an introduction to the Gita by Warren Hastings. Soon the work was translated into other European languages such as German, French and Russian.

text: In 1849, the Weleyan Mission Press, Bangalore published The Bhagavat-Geeta, Or, Dialogues of Krishna and Arjoon in Eighteen Lectures, with Sanskrit, Canarese and English in parallel columns, edited by Rev. John Garrett, and the efforts being supported by Sir. Mark Cubbon[91]

text: Bhagavad Gita integrates various schools of thought, notably Vedanta, Samkhya and Yoga, and other theistic ideas. It remains a popular text for commentators belonging to various philosophical schools. However, its composite nature also leads to varying interpretations of the text. In the words of Mysore Hiriyanna,

text: [The Gita] is one of the hardest books to interpret, which accounts for the numerous commentaries on it–each differing from the rest in one essential point or the other.[92]

text: Richard H. Davis cites Callewaert & Hemraj's 1982 count of 1891 BG translations in 75 languages, including 273 in English.[93][page needed]

text: Classical commentaries[edit]

text: Śaṅkara[edit]

text: The oldest and most influential medieval commentary was that of Adi Shankara (788–820 CE),[94] also known as Shankaracharya (Sanskrit: Śaṅkarācārya).[95][96] Shankara's commentary was based on a recension of the Gita containing 700 verses, and that recension has been widely adopted by others.[97]

text: Rāmānuja[edit]

text: Ramanujacharya's commentary chiefly seeks to show that the discipline of devotion to God (Bhakti yoga) is the way of salvation.[98]

text: Madhva[edit]

text: Madhva, a commentator of the Dvaita Vedanta school,[99] whose dates are given either as (1199–1276 CE)[100] or as (1238–1317 CE),[73] also known as Madhvacharya (Sanskrit: Madhvācārya), wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, which exemplifies the thinking of the "dualist" school.[95] Winthrop Sargeant quotes a dualistic assertion of the Madhva's school that there is "an eternal and complete distinction between the Supreme, the many souls, and matter and its divisions".[73] His commentary on the Gita is called Gita Bhāshya. It has been annotated on by many ancient pontiffs of Dvaita Vedanta school like Padmanabha Tirtha, Jayatirtha, and Raghavendra Tirtha.[101]

text: Abhinavagupta[edit]

text: In the Shaiva tradition,[102] the renowned philosopher Abhinavagupta (10–11th century CE) has written a commentary on a slightly variant recension called Gitartha-Samgraha.

text: Others[edit]

text: Other classical commentators include

text:
Bhāskara
Nimbarka (1162 CE)
Vidyadhiraja Tirtha, Vallabha (1479 CE)
Madhusudana Saraswati,
Raghavendra Tirtha,
Vanamali Mishra,
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486 CE),[103]
Dnyaneshwar (1275–1296 CE) translated and commented on the Gita in Marathi, in his book Dnyaneshwari.[104]

text: Independence movement[edit]

text: At a time when Indian nationalists were seeking an indigenous basis for social and political action, Bhagavad Gita provided them with a rationale for their activism and fight against injustice.[105] Among nationalists, notable commentaries were written by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi, who used the text to help inspire the Indian independence movement.[note 8][note 9] Tilak wrote his commentary Shrimadh Bhagvad Gita Rahasya while in jail during the period 1910–1911 serving a six-year sentence imposed by the British colonial government in India for sedition.[106] While noting that the Gita teaches possible paths to liberation, his commentary places most emphasis on Karma yoga.[107] No book was more central to Gandhi's life and thought than the Bhagavad Gita, which he referred to as his "spiritual dictionary".[108] During his stay in Yeravda jail in 1929,[108] Gandhi wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita in Gujarati. The Gujarati manuscript was translated into English by Mahadev Desai, who provided an additional introduction and commentary. It was published with a foreword by Gandhi in 1946. [109][110][note 10] Mahatma Gandhi expressed his love for the Gita in these words:

text: I find a solace in the Bhagavadgītā that I miss even in the Sermon on the Mount. When disappointment stares me in the face and all alone I see not one ray of light, I go back to the Bhagavadgītā. I find a verse here and a verse there and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming tragedies – and my life has been full of external tragedies – and if they have left no visible, no indelible scar on me, I owe it all to the teaching of Bhagavadgītā.[111][112]

text: Hindu revivalism[edit]

text: Although Vivekananda did not write any commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, his works contained numerous references to the Gita, such as his lectures on the four yogas – Bhakti, Gyaana, Karma, and Raja.[113] Through the message of the Gita, Vivekananda sought to energise the people of India to claim their own dormant but strong identity.[114] Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay thought that the answer to the problems that beset Hindu society was a revival of Hinduism in its purity, which lay in the reinterpretation of Bhagavad Gita for a new India.[115] Aurobindo saw Bhagavad Gita as a "scripture of the future religion" and suggested that Hinduism had acquired a much wider relevance through the Gita.[116] Sivananda called Bhagavad Gita "the most precious jewel of Hindu literature" and suggested its introduction into the curriculum of Indian schools and colleges.[117] In the lectures Chinmayananda gave, on tours undertaken to revive the moral and spiritual values of the Hindus, he borrowed the concept of Gyaana yajna, or the worship to invoke divine wisdom, from the Gita.[118] He viewed the Gita as an universal scripture to turn a person from a state of agitation and confusion to a state of complete vision, inner contentment, and dynamic action. Teachings of International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), a Gaudiya Vaishnava religious organisation which spread rapidly in North America in the 1970s and 1980s, are based on a translation of the Gita called Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.[119]

text: Other modern commentaries[edit]

text: Among notable modern commentators of the Bhagavad Gita are Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Vinoba Bhave, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Chinmayananda, etc. Chinmayananda took a syncretistic approach to interpret the text of the Gita.[120][121]

text: Paramahansa Yogananda's two volume commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, called God Talks With Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita, was released 1995.[122]

text: Eknath Easwaran has also written a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. It examines the applicability of the principles of Gita to the problems of modern life.[123]

text: The version by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, entitled Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, is "by far the most widely distributed of all English Gita translations" due to ISKCON efforts.[124] For each verse, he gives the verse in the Sanskrit Devanagari script, followed by a roman transliteration, a gloss for each word, and then a translation and commentary.[124] Its publisher, the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, estimates sales at twenty-three million copies, a figure which includes the original English edition and secondary translations into fifty-six other languages.[124]

text: Bhagavad Gita – The song of God[125] written by Swami Mukundananda.

text: Other notable commentators include Jeaneane Fowler, Ithamar Theodor, Swami Parthasarathy, and Sadhu Vasvani.[126][127] In 1966, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi published a partial translation.[128]

text: Scholarly translations[edit]

text: The first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita was done by Charles Wilkins in 1785.[129][130] In 1981, Larson listed more than 40 English translations of the Gita, stating that "A complete listing of Gita translations and a related secondary bibliography would be nearly endless".[131]:514 He stated that "Overall ... there is a massive translational tradition in English, pioneered by the British, solidly grounded philologically by the French and Germans, provided with its indigenous roots by a rich heritage of modern Indian comment and reflection, extended into various disciplinary areas by Americans, and having generated in our time a broadly based cross-cultural awareness of the importance of the Bhagavad Gita both as an expression of a specifically Indian spirituality and as one of the great religious "classics" of all time."[131]:518 Sanskrit scholar Barbara Stoler Miller produced a translation in 1986 intended to emphasise the poem's influence and current context within English Literature, especially the works of T.S. Eliot, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.[132] The translation was praised by scholars as well as literary critics[133] and became one of the most continually popular translations to date.[134]

text: The Gita in other languages[edit]

text: The Gita has also been translated into European languages other than English. In 1808, passages from the Gita were part of the first direct translation of Sanskrit into German, appearing in a book through which Friedrich Schlegel became known as the founder of Indian philology in Germany.[135] Swami Rambhadracharya released the first Braille version of the scripture, with the original Sanskrit text and a Hindi commentary, on 30 November 2007.[web 30] The former Turkish Scholar-Politician, Bulent Ecevit translated several Sanskrit scriptures, including the Gita, into Turkish. Mahavidwan

text: Gita Press has published the Gita in multiple Indian languages.[136] R. Raghava Iyengar translated the Gita into Tamil in sandam metre poetic form.[137] The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust publishes the Gita in more than forty languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Kazakh, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, and sixteen Indian languages.[138]

text: Philological research[edit]

text: The textual development of the Bhagavad Gita has been researched, but the methods of this research have developed since its onset in the late 18th century. According to Adluri and Bagchee, 19th century German indologists had an anti-Brahmanic stance,[139] due to their "Protestant suspicion of the Brahmans."[140] They conceived of the Mahabharata as an Indo-Germanic war-epic in origin, to which layers of text were added by the later Brahmins, including the Bhagavad Gita.[141] This interpretation was fueled by the search for Germanic origins and identity, in which the Brahmins were anti-thetical to the pure Aryans.[142] According to Adluri and Bagchee, 20th century Indology professionalized, but remained anti-Brahmanic, though the anti-Brahmanism disappeared from sight and went "underground."[143][note 11]

text: Contemporary popularity[edit]

text: Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi has strongly pitched the Bhagavad Gita as "India's biggest gift to the world".[146] Shri Modi gifted The Bhagavad Gita to the then President of the United States of America, Mr Barack Obama in 2014 during his US visit.[147]

text: With the translation and study of the Bhagavad Gita by Western scholars beginning in the early 18th century, the Bhagavad Gita gained a growing appreciation and popularity.[web 1] According to the Indian historian and writer Khushwant Singh, Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "If—" is "the essence of the message of The Gita in English."[148]

text: Appraisal[edit]

text: The Bhagavad Gita has been highly praised, not only by prominent Indians including Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan,[149] but also by Aldous Huxley, Henry David Thoreau, J. Robert Oppenheimer,[150] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Herman Hesse,[151][152] Bülent Ecevit[153] and others.

text: Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, commented on the Gita:

text: The Bhagavad-Gita deals essentially with the spiritual foundation of human existence. It is a call of action to meet the obligations and duties of life; yet keeping in view the spiritual nature and grander purpose of the universe.[154]

text: A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, 11th President of India, despite being a Muslim, used to read Bhagavad Gita and recite mantras.[155][156][157][158][159]

text: J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist and director of the Manhattan Project, learned Sanskrit in 1933 and read the Bhagavad Gita in the original form, citing it later as one of the most influential books to shape his philosophy of life. Upon witnessing the world's first nuclear test in 1945, he later said he had thought of the quotation "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds", verse 32 from chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita.[150][160]

text: Adaptations[edit]

text: Philip Glass retold the story of Gandhi's early development as an activist in South Africa through the text of the Gita in the opera Satyagraha (1979). The entire libretto of the opera consists of sayings from the Gita sung in the original Sanskrit.[web 31] In Douglas Cuomo's Arjuna's dilemma, the philosophical dilemma faced by Arjuna is dramatised in operatic form with a blend of Indian and Western music styles.[web 32] The 1993 Sanskrit film, Bhagavad Gita, directed by G. V. Iyer won the 1993 National Film Award for Best Film.[web 33][web 34]

text: The 1995 novel and 2000 golf movie The Legend of Bagger Vance are roughly based on the Bhagavad Gita.[161]

text: President of India inaugurates International Gita Mahotsava-2017 in Haryana On November 25, 2017, President Ram Nath Kovind inaugurated the International Gita Mahotsava-2017 in Kurukshetra, Haryana. Mauritius is the partner country and Uttar Pradesh is the partner state for this event. About 20 lakh people participated in Gita Mahotsav last year, which also included people from 35 countries. About 25–30 lakh people are expected to participate in this event till December 3, 2017.


document_title: History of statistics

question_text: who used the german word statistik for the first time

question_tokens: who used the german word statistik for the first time

text: History of statistics

text: Introduction[edit]

text: By the 18th century, the term "statistics" designated the systematic collection of demographic and economic data by states. For at least two millennia, these data were mainly tabulations of human and material resources that might be taxed or put to military use. In the early 19th century, collection intensified, and the meaning of "statistics" broadened to include the discipline concerned with the collection, summary, and analysis of data. Today, data is collected and statistics are computed and widely distributed in government, business, most of the sciences and sports, and even for many pastimes. Electronic computers have expedited more elaborate statistical computation even as they have facilitated the collection and aggregation of data. A single data analyst may have available a set of data-files with millions of records, each with dozens or hundreds of separate measurements. These were collected over time from computer activity (for example, a stock exchange) or from computerized sensors, point-of-sale registers, and so on. Computers then produce simple, accurate summaries, and allow more tedious analyses, such as those that require inverting a large matrix or perform hundreds of steps of iteration, that would never be attempted by hand. Faster computing has allowed statisticians to develop "computer-intensive" methods which may look at all permutations, or use randomization to look at 10,000 permutations of a problem, to estimate answers that are not easy to quantify by theory alone..

text: The term "mathematical statistics" designates the mathematical theories of probability and statistical inference, which are used in statistical practice. The relation between statistics and probability theory developed rather late, however. In the 19th century, statistics increasingly used probability theory, whose initial results were found in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in the analysis of games of chance (gambling). By 1800, astronomy used probability models and statistical theories, particularly the method of least squares. Early probability theory and statistics was systematized in the 19th century and statistical reasoning and probability models were used by social scientists to advance the new sciences of experimental psychology and sociology, and by physical scientists in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The development of statistical reasoning was closely associated with the development of inductive logic and the scientific method, which are concerns that move statisticians away from the narrower area of mathematical statistics. Much of the theoretical work was readily available by the time computers were available to exploit them. By the 1970s, Johnson and Kotz produced a four-volume Compendium on Statistical Distributions (First Edition 1969-1972), which is still an invaluable resource.

text: Applied statistics can be regarded as not a field of mathematics but an autonomous mathematical science, like computer science and operations research. Unlike mathematics, statistics had its origins in public administration. Applications arose early in demography and economics; large areas of micro- and macro-economics today are "statistics" with an emphasis on time-series analyses. With its emphasis on learning from data and making best predictions, statistics also has been shaped by areas of academic research including psychological testing, medicine and epidemiology. The ideas of statistical testing have considerable overlap with decision science. With its concerns with searching and effectively presenting data, statistics has overlap with information science and computer science.

text: Etymology[edit]

text: The term statistics is ultimately derived from the New Latin statisticum collegium ("council of state") and the Italian word statista ("statesman" or "politician"). The German Statistik, first introduced by Gottfried Achenwall (1749), originally designated the analysis of data about the state, signifying the "science of state" (then called political arithmetic in English). It acquired the meaning of the collection and classification of data generally in the early 19th century. It was introduced into English in 1791 by Sir John Sinclair when he published the first of 21 volumes titled Statistical Account of Scotland.[1]

text: Thus, the original principal purpose of Statistik was data to be used by governmental and (often centralized) administrative bodies. The collection of data about states and localities continues, largely through national and international statistical services. In particular, censuses provide frequently updated information about the population.

text: The first book to have 'statistics' in its title was "Contributions to Vital Statistics" (1845) by Francis GP Neison, actuary to the Medical Invalid and General Life Office.[citation needed]

text: Origins in probability theory[edit]

text: Basic forms of statistics have been used since the beginning of civilization. Early empires often collated censuses of the population or recorded the trade in various commodities. The Roman Empire was one of the first states to extensively gather data on the size of the empire's population, geographical area and wealth.

text: The use of statistical methods dates back to least to the 5th century BCE. The historian Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War [2]  describes how the Athenians calculated the height of the wall of Platea by counting the number of bricks in an unplastered section of the wall sufficiently near them to be able to count them. The count was repeated several times by a number of soldiers. The most frequent value (in modern terminology - the mode ) so determined was taken to be the most likely value of the number of bricks. Multiplying this value by the height of the bricks used in the wall allowed the Athenians to determine the height of the ladders necessary to scale the walls.

text: In the Indian epic - the Mahabharata (Book 3: The Story of Nala) - King Rtuparna estimated the number of fruit and leaves (2095 fruit and 50,000,000 - five crores - leaves) on two great branches of a Vibhitaka tree by counting them on a single twig. This number was then multiplied by the number of twigs on the branches. This estimate was later checked and found to be very close to the actual number. With knowledge of this method Nala was subsequently able to regain his kingdom.

text: The earliest writing on statistics was found in a 9th-century book entitled: "Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages", written by Al-Kindi (801–873 CE). In his book, Al-Kindi gave a detailed description of how to use statistics and frequency analysis to decipher encrypted messages. This text arguably gave rise to the birth of both statistics and cryptanalysis.[3][4]

text: The Trial of the Pyx is a test of the purity of the coinage of the Royal Mint which has been held on a regular basis since the 12th century. The Trial itself is based on statistical sampling methods. After minting a series of coins - originally from ten pounds of silver - a single coin was placed in the Pyx - a box in Westminster Abbey. After a given period - now once a year - the coins are removed and weighed. A sample of coins removed from the box are then tested for purity.

text: The Nuova Cronica, a 14th-century history of Florence by the Florentine banker and official Giovanni Villani, includes much statistical information on population, ordinances, commerce and trade, education, and religious facilities and has been described as the first introduction of statistics as a positive element in history,[5] though neither the term nor the concept of statistics as a specific field yet existed. But this was proven to be incorrect after the rediscovery of Al-Kindi's book on frequency analysis.[3][4]

text: The arithmetic mean, although a concept known to the Greeks, was not generalised to more than two values until the 16th century. The invention of the decimal system by Simon Stevin in 1585 seems likely to have facilitated these calculations. This method was first adopted in astronomy by Tycho Brahe who was attempting to reduce the errors in his estimates of the locations of various celestial bodies.

text: The idea of the median originated in Edward Wright's book on navigation (Certaine Errors in Navigation) in 1599 in a section concerning the determination of location with a compass. Wright felt that this value was the most likely to be the correct value in a series of observations.

text: The birth of statistics is often dated to 1662, when John Graunt, along with William Petty, developed early human statistical and census methods that provided a framework for modern demography. He produced the first life table, giving probabilities of survival to each age. His book Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality used analysis of the mortality rolls to make the first statistically based estimation of the population of London. He knew that there were around 13,000 funerals per year in London and that three people died per eleven families per year. He estimated from the parish records that the average family size was 8 and calculated that the population of London was about 384,000; this is the first known use of a ratio estimator. Laplace in 1802 estimated the population of France with a similar method; see Ratio estimator § History for details.

text: Although the original scope of statistics was limited to data useful for governance, the approach was extended to many fields of a scientific or commercial nature during the 19th century. The mathematical foundations for the subject heavily drew on the new probability theory, pioneered in the 16th century by Gerolamo Cardano, Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal. Christiaan Huygens (1657) gave the earliest known scientific treatment of the subject. Jakob Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi (posthumous, 1713) and Abraham de Moivre's The Doctrine of Chances (1718) treated the subject as a branch of mathematics. In his book Bernoulli introduced the idea of representing complete certainty as one and probability as a number between zero and one.

text: A key early application of statistics in the 18th century was to the human sex ratio at birth.[6] John Arbuthnot studied this question in 1710.[7][8][9][10] Arbuthnot examined birth records in London for each of the 82 years from 1629 to 1710. In every year, the number of males born in London exceeded the number of females. Considering more male or more female births as equally likely, the probability of the observed outcome is 0.5^82, or about 1 in 4,8360,0000,0000,0000,0000,0000; in modern terms, the p-value. This is vanishingly small, leading Arbuthnot that this was not due to chance, but to divine providence: "From whence it follows, that it is Art, not Chance, that governs." This is and other work by Arbuthnot is credited as "… the first use of significance tests …"[11] the first example of reasoning about statistical significance and moral certainty,[12] and "… perhaps the first published report of a nonparametric test …",[8] specifically the sign test; see details at Sign test § History.

text: The formal study of theory of errors may be traced back to Roger Cotes' Opera Miscellanea (posthumous, 1722), but a memoir prepared by Thomas Simpson in 1755 (printed 1756) first applied the theory to the discussion of errors of observation. The reprint (1757) of this memoir lays down the axioms that positive and negative errors are equally probable, and that there are certain assignable limits within which all errors may be supposed to fall; continuous errors are discussed and a probability curve is given. Simpson discussed several possible distributions of error. He first considered the uniform distribution and then the discrete symmetric triangular distribution followed by the continuous symmetric triangle distribution. Tobias Mayer, in his study of the libration of the moon (Kosmographische Nachrichten, Nuremberg, 1750), invented the first formal method for estimating the unknown quantities by generalized the averaging of observations under identical circumstances to the averaging of groups of similar equations.

text: Ruder Boškovic in 1755 based in his work on the shape of the earth proposed in his book De Litteraria expeditione per pontificiam ditionem ad dimetiendos duos meridiani gradus a PP. Maire et Boscovicli that the true value of a series of observations would be that which minimises the sum of absolute errors. In modern terminology this value is the median. The first example of what later became known as the normal curve was studied by Abraham de Moivre who plotted this curve on November 12, 1733.[13] de Moivre was studying the number of heads that occurred when a 'fair' coin was tossed.

text: In 1761 Thomas Bayes proved Bayes' theorem and in 1765 Joseph Priestley invented the first timeline charts.

text: Johann Heinrich Lambert in his 1765 book Anlage zur Architectonic proposed the semicircle as a distribution of errors:

text: with -1 < x < 1.

text: Pierre-Simon Laplace (1774) made the first attempt to deduce a rule for the combination of observations from the principles of the theory of probabilities. He represented the law of probability of errors by a curve and deduced a formula for the mean of three observations.

text: Laplace in 1774 noted that the frequency of an error could be expressed as an exponential function of its magnitude once its sign was disregarded.[14][15] This distribution is now known as the Laplace distribution. Lagrange proposed a parabolic distribution of errors in 1776.

text: Laplace in 1778 published his second law of errors wherein he noted that the frequency of an error was proportional to the exponential of the square of its magnitude. This was subsequently rediscovered by Gauss (possibly in 1795) and is now best known as the normal distribution which is of central importance in statistics.[16] This distribution was first referred to as the normal distribution by Pierce in 1873 who was studying measurement errors when an object was dropped onto a wooden base.[17] He chose the term normal because of its frequent occurrence in naturally occurring variables.

text: Lagrange also suggested in 1781 two other distributions for errors - a raised cosine distribution and a logarithmic distribution.

text: Laplace gave (1781) a formula for the law of facility of error (a term due to Joseph Louis Lagrange, 1774), but one which led to unmanageable equations. Daniel Bernoulli (1778) introduced the principle of the maximum product of the probabilities of a system of concurrent errors.

text: In 1786 William Playfair (1759-1823) introduced the idea of graphical representation into statistics. He invented the line chart, bar chart and histogram and incorporated them into his works on economics, the Commercial and Political Atlas. This was followed in 1795 by his invention of the pie chart and circle chart which he used to display the evolution of England's imports and exports. These latter charts came to general attention when he published examples in his Statistical Breviary in 1801.

text: Laplace, in an investigation of the motions of Saturn and Jupiter in 1787, generalized Mayer's method by using different linear combinations of a single group of equations.

text: In 1791 Sir John Sinclair introduced the term 'statistics' into English in his Statistical Accounts of Scotland.

text: In 1802 Laplace estimated the population of France to be 28,328,612.[18] He calculated this figure using the number of births in the previous year and census data for three communities. The census data of these communities showed that they had 2,037,615 persons and that the number of births were 71,866. Assuming that these samples were representative of France, Laplace produced his estimate for the entire population.

text: The method of least squares, which was used to minimize errors in data measurement, was published independently by Adrien-Marie Legendre (1805), Robert Adrain (1808), and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1809). Gauss had used the method in his famous 1801 prediction of the location of the dwarf planet Ceres. The observations that Gauss based his calculations on were made by the Italian monk Piazzi.

text: The term probable error (der wahrscheinliche Fehler) - the median deviation from the mean - was introduced in 1815 by the German astronomer Frederik Wilhelm Bessel. Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1843 was the first to use the term median (valeur médiane) for the value that divides a probability distribution into two equal halves.

text:
Other contributors to the theory of errors were Ellis (1844), De Morgan (1864), Glaisher (1872), and Giovanni Schiaparelli (1875).[citation needed] Peters's (1856) formula for

r

{\displaystyle r}

, the "probable error" of a single observation was widely used and inspired early robust statistics (resistant to outliers: see Peirce's criterion).

text: In the 19th century authors on statistical theory included Laplace, S. Lacroix (1816), Littrow (1833), Dedekind (1860), Helmert (1872), Laurent (1873), Liagre, Didion, De Morgan and Boole.

text: Gustav Theodor Fechner used the median (Centralwerth) in sociological and psychological phenomena.[19] It had earlier been used only in astronomy and related fields. Francis Galton used the English term median for the first time in 1881 having earlier used the terms middle-most value in 1869 and the medium in 1880.[20]

text: Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), another important founder of statistics, introduced the notion of the "average man" (l'homme moyen) as a means of understanding complex social phenomena such as crime rates, marriage rates, and suicide rates.[21]

text: The first tests of the normal distribution were invented by the German statistician Wilhelm Lexis in the 1870s. The only data sets available to him that he was able to show were normally distributed were birth rates.

text: Development of modern statistics[edit]

text: Although the origins of statistical theory lie in the 18th-century advances in probability, the modern field of statistics only emerged in the late-19th and early-20th century in three stages. The first wave, at the turn of the century, was led by the work of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, who transformed statistics into a rigorous mathematical discipline used for analysis, not just in science, but in industry and politics as well. The second wave of the 1910s and 20s was initiated by William Gosset, and reached its culmination in the insights of Ronald Fisher. This involved the development of better design of experiments models, hypothesis testing and techniques for use with small data samples. The final wave, which mainly saw the refinement and expansion of earlier developments, emerged from the collaborative work between Egon Pearson and Jerzy Neyman in the 1930s.[22] Today, statistical methods are applied in all fields that involve decision making, for making accurate inferences from a collated body of data and for making decisions in the face of uncertainty based on statistical methodology.

text: The first statistical bodies were established in the early 19th century. The Royal Statistical Society was founded in 1834 and Florence Nightingale, its first female member, pioneered the application of statistical analysis to health problems for the furtherance of epidemiological understanding and public health practice. However, the methods then used would not be considered as modern statistics today.

text: The Oxford scholar Francis Ysidro Edgeworth's book, Metretike: or The Method of Measuring Probability and Utility (1887) dealt with probability as the basis of inductive reasoning, and his later works focused on the 'philosophy of chance'.[23] His first paper on statistics (1883) explored the law of error (normal distribution), and his Methods of Statistics (1885) introduced an early version of the t distribution, the Edgeworth expansion, the Edgeworth series, the method of variate transformation and the asymptotic theory of maximum likelihood estimates.

text: The Norwegian Anders Nicolai Kiær introduced the concept of stratified sampling in 1895.[24] Arthur Lyon Bowley introduced new methods of data sampling in 1906 when working on social statistics. Although statistical surveys of social conditions had started with Charles Booth's "Life and Labour of the People in London" (1889-1903) and Seebohm Rowntree's "Poverty, A Study of Town Life" (1901), Bowley's, key innovation consisted of the use of random sampling techniques. His efforts culminated in his New Survey of London Life and Labour.[25]

text: Francis Galton is credited as one of the principal founders of statistical theory. His contributions to the field included introducing the concepts of standard deviation, correlation,  regression and the application of these methods to the study of the variety of human characteristics - height, weight, eyelash length among others. He found that many of these could be fitted to a normal curve distribution.[26]

text: Galton submitted a paper to Nature in 1907 on the usefulness of the median.[27] He examined the accuracy of 787 guesses of the weight of an ox at a country fair. The actual weight was 1208 pounds: the median guess was 1198. The guesses were markedly non-normally distributed.

text: Galton's publication of Natural Inheritance in 1889 sparked the interest of a brilliant mathematician, Karl Pearson,[28] then working at University College London, and he went on to found the discipline of mathematical statistics.[29] He emphasised the statistical foundation of scientific laws and promoted its study and his laboratory attracted students from around the world attracted by his new methods of analysis, including Udny Yule. His work grew to encompass the fields of biology, epidemiology, anthropometry, medicine and social history. In 1901, with Walter Weldon, founder of biometry, and Galton, he founded the journal Biometrika as the first journal of mathematical statistics and biometry.

text: His work, and that of Galton's, underpins many of the 'classical' statistical methods which are in common use today, including the Correlation coefficient, defined as a product-moment;[30] the method of moments for the fitting of distributions to samples; Pearson's system of continuous curves that forms the basis of the now conventional continuous probability distributions; Chi distance a precursor and special case of the Mahalanobis distance[31] and P-value, defined as the probability measure of the complement of the ball with the hypothesized value as center point and chi distance as radius.[31] He also introduced the term  'standard deviation'.

text: He also founded the statistical hypothesis testing theory,[31] Pearson's chi-squared test and principal component analysis.[32][33] In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London.

text: The second wave of mathematical statistics was pioneered by Ronald Fisher who wrote two textbooks, Statistical Methods for Research Workers, published in 1925 and The Design of Experiments in 1935, that were to define the academic discipline in universities around the world. He also systematized previous results, putting them on a firm mathematical footing. In his 1918 seminal paper The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance, the first use to use the statistical term, variance. In 1919, at Rothamsted Experimental Station he started a major study of the extensive collections of data recorded over many years. This resulted in a series of reports under the general title Studies in Crop Variation. In 1930 he published The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection where he applied statistics to evolution.

text: Over the next seven years, he pioneered the principles of the design of experiments (see below) and elaborated his studies of analysis of variance. He furthered his studies of the statistics of small samples. Perhaps even more important, he began his systematic approach of the analysis of real data as the springboard for the development of new statistical methods. He developed computational algorithms for analyzing data from his balanced experimental designs. In 1925, this work resulted in the publication of his first book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers.[35] This book went through many editions and translations in later years, and it became the standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines. In 1935, this book was followed by The Design of Experiments, which was also widely used.

text:
In addition to analysis of variance, Fisher named and promoted the method of maximum likelihood estimation. Fisher also originated the concepts of sufficiency, ancillary statistics, Fisher's linear discriminator and Fisher information. His article On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics (1924) presented Pearson's chi-squared test and William Gosset's t in the same framework as the Gaussian distribution, and his own parameter in the analysis of variance Fisher's z-distribution (more commonly used decades later in the form of the F distribution).[36]
The 5% level of significance appears to have been introduced by Fisher in 1925.[37] Fisher stated that deviations exceeding twice the standard deviation are regarded as significant. Before this deviations exceeding three times the probable error were considered significant. For a symmetrical distribution the probable error is half the interquartile range. For a normal distribution the probable error is approximately 2/3 the standard deviation. It appears that Fisher's 5% criterion was rooted in previous practice.

text: Other important contributions at this time included Charles Spearman's rank correlation coefficient that was a useful extension of the Pearson correlation coefficient. William Sealy Gosset, the English statistician better known under his pseudonym of Student, introduced Student's t-distribution, a continuous probability distribution useful in situations where the sample size is small and population standard deviation is unknown.

text: Egon Pearson (Karl's son) and Jerzy Neyman introduced the concepts of "Type II" error, power of a test and confidence intervals. Jerzy Neyman in 1934 showed that stratified random sampling was in general a better method of estimation than purposive (quota) sampling.[38]

text: Design of experiments[edit]

text: This section relies too much on references to primary sources. Please improve this section by adding secondary or tertiary sources. (February 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

text: In 1747, while serving as surgeon on HM Bark Salisbury, James Lind carried out a controlled experiment to develop a cure for scurvy.[39] In this study his subjects' cases "were as similar as I could have them", that is he provided strict entry requirements to reduce extraneous variation. The men were paired, which provided blocking. From a modern perspective, the main thing that is missing is randomized allocation of subjects to treatments.

text: Lind is today often described as a one-factor-at-a-time experimenter.[40] Similar one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) experimentation was performed at the Rothamsted Research Station in the 1840s by Sir John Lawes to determine the optimal inorganic fertilizer for use on wheat.[40]

text: A theory of statistical inference was developed by Charles S. Peirce in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" (1877–1878) and "A Theory of Probable Inference" (1883), two publications that emphasized the importance of randomization-based inference in statistics. In another study, Peirce randomly assigned volunteers to a blinded, repeated-measures design to evaluate their ability to discriminate weights.[41][42][43][44]

text: Peirce's experiment inspired other researchers in psychology and education, which developed a research tradition of randomized experiments in laboratories and specialized textbooks in the 1800s.[41][42][43][44] Peirce also contributed the first English-language publication on an optimal design for regression-models in 1876.[45] A pioneering optimal design for polynomial regression was suggested by Gergonne in 1815.[citation needed] In 1918 Kirstine Smith published optimal designs for polynomials of degree six (and less).[46]

text: The use of a sequence of experiments, where the design of each may depend on the results of previous experiments, including the possible decision to stop experimenting, was pioneered[47] by Abraham Wald in the context of sequential tests of statistical hypotheses.[48] Surveys are available of optimal sequential designs,[49] and of adaptive designs.[50] One specific type of sequential design is the "two-armed bandit", generalized to the multi-armed bandit, on which early work was done by Herbert Robbins in 1952.[51]

text: The term "design of experiments" (DOE) derives from early statistical work performed by Sir Ronald Fisher. He was described by Anders Hald as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science."[52] Fisher initiated the principles of design of experiments and elaborated on his studies of "analysis of variance". Perhaps even more important, Fisher began his systematic approach to the analysis of real data as the springboard for the development of new statistical methods.  He began to pay particular attention to the labour involved in the necessary computations performed by hand, and developed methods that were as practical as they were founded in rigour.  In 1925, this work culminated in the publication of his first book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers.[53]  This went into many editions and translations in later years, and became a standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines.[54]

text: A methodology for designing experiments was proposed by Ronald A. Fisher, in his innovative book The Design of Experiments (1935) which also became a standard.[55][56][57][58] As an example, he described how to test the hypothesis that a certain lady could distinguish by flavour alone whether the milk or the tea was first placed in the cup. While this sounds like a frivolous application, it allowed him to illustrate the most important ideas of experimental design: see Lady tasting tea.

text: Agricultural science advances served to meet the combination of larger city populations and fewer farms. But for crop scientists to take due account of widely differing geographical growing climates and needs, it was important to differentiate local growing conditions. To extrapolate experiments on local crops to a national scale, they had to extend crop sample testing economically to overall populations. As statistical methods advanced (primarily the efficacy of designed experiments instead of one-factor-at-a-time experimentation), representative factorial design of experiments began to enable the meaningful extension, by inference, of experimental sampling results to the population as a whole.[citation needed] But it was hard to decide how representative was the crop sample chosen.[citation needed] Factorial design methodology showed how to estimate and correct for any random variation within the sample and also in the data collection procedures.

text: Bayesian statistics[edit]

text: The term Bayesian refers to Thomas Bayes (1702–1761), who proved a special case of what is now called Bayes' theorem. However it was Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) who introduced a general version of the theorem and applied it to celestial mechanics, medical statistics, reliability, and jurisprudence.[59]  When insufficient knowledge was available to specify an informed prior, Laplace used uniform priors, according to his "principle of insufficient reason".[59][60] Laplace assumed uniform priors for mathematical simplicity rather than for philosophical reasons.[59] Laplace also introduced[citation needed] primitive versions of conjugate priors and the theorem of von Mises and Bernstein, according to which the posteriors corresponding to initially differing priors ultimately agree, as the number of observations increases.[61] This early Bayesian inference, which used uniform priors following Laplace's principle of insufficient reason, was called "inverse probability" (because it infers backwards from observations to parameters, or from effects to causes[62]).

text:
After the 1920s, inverse probability  was largely supplanted[citation needed]  by a collection of methods that were developed by Ronald A. Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson. Their methods came to be called frequentist statistics.[62] Fisher rejected the Bayesian view, writing that "the theory of inverse probability is founded upon an error, and must be wholly rejected".[63] At the end of his life, however, Fisher expressed greater respect for the essay of Bayes, which Fisher believed to have anticipated his own, fiducial approach to probability; Fisher still maintained that Laplace's views on probability were "fallacious rubbish".[63] Neyman started out as a "quasi-Bayesian", but subsequently developed confidence intervals (a key method in frequentist statistics) because "the whole theory would look nicer if it were built from the start without reference to Bayesianism and priors".[64]
The word Bayesian appeared around 1950, and by the 1960s it became the term preferred by those dissatisfied with the limitations of frequentist statistics.[62][65]

text: In the 20th century, the ideas of Laplace were further developed in two different directions, giving rise to objective and subjective currents in Bayesian practice. In the objectivist stream, the statistical analysis depends on only the model assumed and the data analysed.[66] No subjective decisions need to be involved. In contrast, "subjectivist" statisticians deny the possibility of fully objective analysis for the general case.

text: In the further development of Laplace's ideas, subjective ideas predate objectivist positions. The idea that 'probability' should be interpreted as 'subjective degree of belief in a proposition' was  proposed, for example, by John Maynard Keynes in the early 1920s.[citation needed] This idea was taken further by Bruno de Finetti in Italy (Fondamenti Logici del Ragionamento Probabilistico, 1930) and Frank Ramsey in Cambridge (The Foundations of Mathematics, 1931).[67] The approach was devised to solve problems with the  frequentist definition of probability but also with the earlier, objectivist approach of Laplace.[66] The subjective Bayesian methods were further developed and popularized in the 1950s by L.J. Savage.[citation needed]

text: Objective Bayesian inference was further developed by Harold Jeffreys at the University of Cambridge. His seminal book "Theory of probability" first appeared in 1939 and played an important role in the revival of the Bayesian view of probability.[68][69] In 1957, Edwin Jaynes promoted the concept of maximum entropy for constructing priors, which is an important principle in the formulation of objective methods, mainly for discrete problems. In 1965, Dennis Lindley's 2-volume work "Introduction to Probability and Statistics from a Bayesian Viewpoint" brought Bayesian methods to a wide audience. In 1979, José-Miguel Bernardo introduced reference analysis,[66] which offers a general applicable framework for objective analysis.[70] Other well-known proponents of Bayesian probability theory include I.J. Good, B.O. Koopman, Howard Raiffa, Robert Schlaifer and Alan Turing.

text: In the 1980s, there was a dramatic growth in research and applications of Bayesian methods, mostly attributed to the discovery of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, which removed many of the computational problems, and an increasing interest in nonstandard, complex applications.[71] Despite growth of Bayesian research, most undergraduate teaching is still based on frequentist statistics.[72] Nonetheless, Bayesian methods are widely accepted and used, such as for example in the field of machine learning.[73]

text: Important contributors to statistics[edit]

text:
Thomas Bayes
George E. P. Box
Pafnuty Chebyshev
David R. Cox
Gertrude Cox
Harald Cramér
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
Bradley Efron
Bruno de Finetti
Ronald A. Fisher
Francis Galton

Carl Friedrich Gauss
William Sealey Gosset ("Student")
Andrey Kolmogorov
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Erich L. Lehmann
Aleksandr Lyapunov
Anil Kumar Gain
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis
Abraham De Moivre
Jerzy Neyman
Florence Nightingale

Blaise Pascal
Karl Pearson
Charles S. Peirce
Adolphe Quetelet
C. R. Rao
Walter A. Shewhart
Charles Spearman
Charles Stein
Thorvald N. Thiele
John Tukey
Abraham Wald