Warring States Project
Statistics
Your friend has gotten 7 Heads out of 10 tosses; is he using a dishonest coin? The grass is greener on the east end of your lawn; does this mean anything? The Gwodyen text of the Dau/Dv Jing includes all or part of 32 chapters of our 81-chapter text, but none from the last 15 of those chapters; can any conclusion be drawn from this? A low ranking tennis player has a game tied with Arthur Ashe; what are his chances of winning? Statistics has been defined as the art of decision based on imperfect knowledge. It is more exactly the art of determining the significance of fully known data. This section contains a primer of that art.
A hand calculator with a square root key will be needed, plus a pad of squared ("quadrille") paper. For explanations of exponents (x²) or reciprocals (1/x) see the Math section. We provide a Glossary of basic statistical terms. Viewer computers should contain the Symbol font, to display "pi" in Greek form as p. For an explanation of our Internet notation compromises (such as n*3 for n³), see the Notation page.
Acknowledgements. Wry thanks are here rendered to the authors of the statistics textbooks which made us mad enough to undertake the present work, and more directly to Mark Hall for examples from archaeology, Sue J Goldie for guidance in the medical literature, Raphael Sealey for data from ancient econometrics, and Christine Skorupski, City Clerk of Northampton Massachusetts, for extracts from the modern records in her care. We also thank several correspondents who have noted errors, raised questions, or suggested improvements. Further assistance of the same sort will be most welcome.
- Contents
- Lesson List
- Elementary
- The Pascal Triangle
- Binomial
- Normal
- Poisson
- Chi Square
- Contingent Chi Square
- Correlation
- Hypergeometric
- Rank Order
- Apparatus
- Glossary
- Math Topics
- Tables
- Internet Resources
- Statistics Links
2 Apr 2007 / Contact The Project / Exit to Home Page
