After Newton's successes, scientists tried to describe the world with mathematical equations. But in biology, economics and psychology they ran into enormous complexity: so many interacting factors made it hard to get equally precise predictions.
A special branch of mathematics developed to study these complex sides of reality: statistics.
In 1744, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace decided to set up an insurance fund for the widows and orphans of clergymen. The ministers were to pay in money regularly, the fund was to invest it, and when a member died, it would provide for his family.
To set the size of the contributions, they had to work out how many members would die each year, how many widows would be left and how long they would have to be supported. The ministers turned to the mathematician Colin Maclaurin. The calculations relied on Bernoulli's law of large numbers and Halley's mortality tables.
The fate of one person is hard to predict, but for a large group you can estimate the number of deaths and future payouts fairly reliably. According to the calculations Harari cites, about 27 of the 930 ministers were expected to die each year, and 18 of them would leave widows.
The most memorable detail is that the founders expected the fund's capital to reach 58,348 pounds by 1765. According to Harari, the actual amount was 58,347 pounds, just one pound short of the forecast. That's how he shows the practical power of statistics.
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