Abstract
In the Théorie, Laplace contributed a new level of mathematical foundation and development both to probability theory and to mathematical statistics. The Essai brought the news to a relatively wide public. Laplace's first important contribution to probability theory was a memoir on the probability of the causes of events. Laplace then addressed the problem of the mean; that is, when different astronomical observations of the same quantity are subject to error. Some of these were more explicitly probabilistic. Laplace also published a short work on demography, where he developed the theory of the ratio method of estimating a population based upon records of births, deaths, or marriages, using a census of a few sample districts. In probability, Laplace's Théorie analytique and Essai stood as unchallenged beacons well into the 20th century, even if the influence of the former was generally through secondary accounts and subsequent extensions by others.
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