information:classification, structural:summarization, stylistic:style_transfer
History

The idea of the median may have first appeared in Edward Wright 's 1599 book Certaine Errors in Navigation on a section about compass navigation. Wright was reluctant to discard measured values, and may have felt that the median — incorporating a greater proportion of the dataset than the mid-range — was more likely to be correct. However, Wright did not give examples of his technique's use, making it hard to verify that he described the modern notion of median. The median (in the context of probability) certainly appeared in the correspondence of Christiaan Huygens, but as an example of a statistic that was inappropriate for actuarial practice.