What is public statistics?

Official statistics are at the heart of daily life with its immense production of figures. However, it is often confused with statistics emanating from the private sphere, like surveys on voting intentions or on the priorities of the French. In fact, official statistics have a history, which goes back to the ancient practice of counting the workforce of cities and states that need information to better know and govern themselves. With the establishment of large-scale data collection and coherent databases, methods have been refined: development of sampling techniques, birth of econometrics, big data shift…

While Gabriel Cramer's name is today inseparable from the famous rule learned in high school for solving linear systems, his work goes well beyond that. Mathematician, professor, publisher, he is also, and this is not a weak word, a 'friendly scholar', to use Daniel Bernoulli's fond memory of him. His masterpiece remains his Introduction to the Analysis of Algebraic Curves, published in 1750 and celebrated by d'Alembert in about ten articles in the Encyclopédie. Let us discover his contributions to algebra, including the proof of what will be called Bézout's theorem, and even the surprising 'paradox' of Euler-Cramer.