Statistical ideas and methods underlie just about every aspect of modern
life. From randomized clinical trials in medical research, to
statistical models of risk in banking and hedge fund industries, to the
statistical tools used to probe vast astronomical databases, the field
of statistics has become centrally important to how we understand our
world. But the discipline underlying all these is not the dull
statistics of the popular imagination. Long gone are the days of manual
arithmetic manipulation. Nowadays statistics is a dynamic discipline,
revolutionized by the computer, which uses advanced software tools to
probe numerical data, seeking structures, patterns, and relationships.
This Very Short Introduction sets the study of statistics in context,
describing its history and giving examples of its impact, summarizes
methods of gathering and evaluating data, and explains the role played
by the science of chance, of probability, in statistical methods. The
book also
explores deep philosophical issues of induction--how we use statistics
to discern the true nature of reality from the limited observations we
necessarily must make.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and
style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of
life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer,
they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central
problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud,
quantum theory to Islam.
