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Standard Deviation

Mathematics

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
1893 1
Proposed By
Karl Pearson 1
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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)
MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St AndrewsView the Source
Standard deviation (Wikipedia)
Belongs To: Statistics, Lead sentence
Quote, 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.
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