On the centennial anniversary of Gini’s theory of statistical relations

The formulation of a unitary methodology for the analysis of relationships between statistical characters stands as a landmark in the Gini contribution to theoretical statistics. On the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the appearance of his most original and important contributions to the subject, this paper aims at highlighting Gini’s proposals, by reformulating them in a language which suits the modern treatments of mathematical statistics. An effort is made to stress the precursory value of those proposals, and to mention in a precise way some of their most significant developments, in particular as far as metrics for spaces of probability distributions and studies about monotone dependence are concerned.