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Standard Deviation
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Standard deviation is a measure of how spread out a set of numbers is around its average, calculated as the square root of the variance, the average of the squared differences between each value and the mean. Karl Pearson coined the term, and the now-standard symbol sigma for it, in an 1893 lecture, giving a settled name to a quantity earlier statisticians had used without one. It remains one of the most widely reported measures of statistical dispersion across every field that summarizes data with a margin of variability.
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