Question basically in title. I am just curious if anyone has any historical references that point to the earliest usages of this notation.
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$\begingroup$ See stats.stackexchange.com/questions/41306/… $\endgroup$– kjetil b halvorsen ♦Commented Mar 19, 2018 at 13:20
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$\begingroup$ @kjetilbhalvorsen Sure, but that answer pertains to matrices and matrices have a history dating back 2000 years. Modern statistical notation was largely developed in the 20th century. $\endgroup$– nthCommented Mar 19, 2018 at 13:46
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3$\begingroup$ I'm tempted to guess n is short for number, but not sure. I do know that it's not upper case to distinguish it from population size (N). $\endgroup$– MBorgCommented Mar 19, 2018 at 14:07
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5$\begingroup$ The notation comes directly from mathematics -- collections of things in mathematics are frequently counted $1,2,...,n$. So, for example, you can see Pearson in 1900 (in ordinary use of mathematical notation) referring to a collection of deviations from expected as $x_1, x_2, ..., x_n$ (in a goodness of fit situation). From that standard use of mathematical notation to labelling original observations in a similar fashion, and so having the sample size be $n$ is an obvious step. I'd say you would have to go back to the first use of $n$ in mathematics to refer to an unspecified number of objects $\endgroup$– Glen_bCommented Mar 19, 2018 at 21:40
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1$\begingroup$ ... so for example, you have Cayley in 1843 referring to $n$ dimensions, and this is the same sense in which Pearson was using $n$ in 1900. $\endgroup$– Glen_bCommented Mar 19, 2018 at 21:44
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