Martin,
A fun question.
Looking back at my oldest books, Feller (1950) used chi-square.
Then I walked down the hall to our little statistics library and looked at
Johnson and
Kotz, "Continous Univariate Distributions", since each chapter therein has
comments about
the history of the distribution.
a. They use 'chi-square' throughout their history section, tracing the
distribution
back to work in the 1800s. But, those earliest papers apparently didn't name
their
results as chi- whatever, so an "origin" story didn't pan out.
b. They have 13 pages of references, and for fun I counted the occurence of
variants.
The majority of papers don't have the word in the title at all and the next
most common is
the Greek symbol. Here are the years of the others:
chi-square: 73 43 65 80 86 73 82 73 69 69 78 64 64 86 65 86 82 82 76 82 88 81
74 77 87
86 93 69 60 88 88 80 77 41 59 79 31
chi-squared: 72 76 82 83 89 79 69 67 77 78 69 77 83 88 87 89 78
chi: 92 73 89 87
chi-squares: 77 83
chi-bar-square: 91
There doesn't look to be a trend over time. The 1922 Fisher reference uses the
Greek
symbol, by the way.
Terry T
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