The practice of the statistical arts goes back to antiquity.
Historians of science can identify several large steps in the development.
Perhaps the earliest is the effective census-taking begun in the 17th century. In the 18th and early 19th centuries several important contributions to the mathematical understanding of statistical regularity were made. Many of these developments revolved around the common games of chance. In the late 19th century the rise of the biological sciences, with masses of irregular data, gave a tremendous push to statistics, and the field began to take its present form. The ubiquitous computer of the late 20th century has provided the statistician with enough computing power to accomplish all the arithmetic required by the methodology.