Роберт Музиль о непараметрической теории оценивания

Из предисловия к книге L. Györfi, M. Kohler, A. Krzyzak and H. Walk, A Distribution-Free Theory of Nonparametric Regression:

Some aspects of nonparametric estimation had already appeared in belletristic literature in 1930/31 in The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (1880-1942) where, in Section 103 (first book), methods of partitioning estimation are described:

"... as happens so often in life, you ... find yourself facing a phenomenon about which you can't quite tell whether it is a law or pure chance; that's where things acquire a human interest. Then you translate a series of observations into a series of figures, which you divide into categories to see which numbers lie between this value and that, and the next, and so on ... You then calculate the degree of aberration, the mean deviation, the degree of deviation from some arbitrary value ... the average value ... and so forth, and with the help of all these concepts you study your given phenomenon"

(cited from page 531 of the English translation, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., Picador, 1995).

Круто, по-моему.