An attempt to trace the birth of importance sampling

06/21/2022

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by   Charly Andral, et al.

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In this note, we try to trace the birth of importance sampling (IS) back to 1949. We found the classical formulation of IS in a paper from Kahn in June 1949. As for the appearance of the expression importance sampling itself, it may have appeared a few months later, maybe in 1949 during conferences, but there is no published article with the name before 1950.