Nature of Statistics
Statistics can be described as all of the following:
- Academic discipline: one with academic departments, curricula and degrees; national and international societies; and specialized journals.
- Scientific field (a branch of science) – widely-recognized category of specialized expertise within science, and typically embodies its own terminology and nomenclature. Such a field will usually be represented by one or more scientific journals, where peer reviewed research is published.
- Formal science – branch of knowledge concerned with formal systems.
- Mathematical science – field of science that is primarily mathematical in nature but may not be universally considered subfields of mathematics proper. Statistics, for example, is mathematical in its methods but grew out of political arithmetic which merged with inverse probability and grew through applications in the social sciences and some areas of physics and biometrics to become its own separate, though closely allied, field.
Read more about this topic: Outline Of Statistics
Famous quotes containing the words nature of, nature and/or statistics:
“The nature of bad news infects the teller.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves. Such a one has curculios, borers, knife-worms; a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)