Lancaster, United Kingdom

Statistics

Table of contents

Statistics at Lancaster University

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: mathematics and statistics
University website: www.lancs.ac.uk
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Definitions and quotes

Statistics
Statistics is a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data. In applying statistics to, for example, a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model process to be studied. Populations can be diverse topics such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with all aspects of data including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments. See glossary of probability and statistics.
Statistics
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain in "Chapters from My Autobiography — XX", North American Review No. DCXVIII (JULY 5, 1907) [1]. His attribution is unverified and the origin is uncertain: see Lies, damned lies, and statistics and Leonard H. Courtney. Other authors to whom the quote has been attributed, as reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), include Henry Labouchère, Abram S. Hewitt, and Holloway H. Frost.
Statistics
Statistics has been the most successful information science.
Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it.
Attributed to Bradley Efron by Jerome H. Friedman (April 2001). "The Role of Statistics in the Data Revolution?". International Statistical Review 69: 5-10.
Statistics
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write.
Attributed to H. G. Wells by Darrell Huff in How to Lie with Statistics (1954), epigraph The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write. [HG Wells 1911, Mankind in the Making 2041]
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