The German 10-Mark note (pre-Euro) featured Carl Friederich Gauß and his equation describing the “normal curve” of probability distribution.
In 1869 Galton only vaguely approached the concept (regression) in its verbal form, but he was unable to formulate in a precise way how the accidental `cropping out' of ‘ancestral peculiarities' might be encompassed in a theory. Still the question kept gnawing at him; over the years 1874-88 he revisited this problem repeatedly, and, bit by bit, he overcame it in one of the grand triumphs of the history of science. The story is an exciting one, involving science, experiment, mathematics, simulation, and one of the great mental experiments of all time.
Stephen M. Stigler, Department of Statistics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA: "Regression towards the mean, historically considered," Statistical Methods in Medical Research 1997; 6: 103±114 p.5
