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.
Facts
Proposed Year Connections
Associated With
Belongs To
Source Standard deviation (Wikipedia)
Proposed By
Source Karl Pearson (MacTutor)
Studied In
Source Karl Pearson (MacTutor)
Sources
1. Karl Pearson (MacTutor)
Standard deviation (Wikipedia)
Belongs To: Statistics, Lead sentenceQuote, Belongs To: Statistics, Lead sentence
In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation of the values of a variable about its (arithmetic) average.
View the Source Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.