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Statistics Overview
Statistics, Science, Mathematics and Computing
Statistics is concerned with methods for discovering and
confirming in data, patterns that are partly (perhaps largely)
obscured by random noise. Of course, so is work in any of the
sciences, so it is not surprising that many data-analytic methods are
developed in the context of particular scientific fields and are then
taken over by other disciplines. For example, the analysis of variance
grew out of agricultural field trials and many time series
techniques out of oceanography. In this sense, the field of
statistics, like other areas of applied mathematics, acts as a
clearing-house for data-analytic ideas: developing, understanding,
abstracting, and packaging them for general use in areas remote from
their origins. It is not necessary---or sufficient---to have majored
in mathematics as an undergraduate in order to become a statistician
or probabilits. In fact, the diversity of applications of the subject
can make it a positive advantage to have majored in another field:
- the most creative statistician of the century, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was also a famous geneticist
- Jerome Friedman, a recent chairman of Statistics at Stanford, was a particle physicist for many years.
Of course, probability and statistics are mathematical sciences,
and so a taste and aptitude for mathematical thinking is a crucial
ingredient. However, many students who have backgrounds in
engineering, computing, physical and even biological sciences will
have such aptitudes and interests, and we encourage them to conside
applying.
Statistics is also, by definition, an information
science. Imaginative use of both computing power and new computing
environments drives much current research---bootstrap and
non-parametric regression methods being hungry local consumers of
megaflops. So a background in computer science can also be a start for
a statistician.
Statistics in Stanford University
This booklet aims to give a general sense of what research
in statistics is all about. However it is also unashamedly focussed on
activities at Stanford. If you would like to study probability and
statistics, we think that Stanford is a splendid place to do it, and
of course we hope that you will apply here!
To boast for a moment about our faculty, we have four members of
the National Academy of Sciences two
of the Institute of Medicine,
three MacArthur `genius' prize fellows, and among younger faculty,
three Presidential Investigator Award winners. We are consistently
ranked together with (or ahead of!) our friends and archrivals at
Berkeley as the leading statistics department in the U.S. The
department is truly international in outlook; over a third of the
faculty and many of the students are foreign born.
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