Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of
data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of
surveys and
experiments.
A
statistician is someone who is particularly well versed in the ways of thinking necessary for the successful application of statistical analysis. Such people have often gained this experience through working in any of a
wide number of fields. There is also a discipline called
mathemtical statistics that studies statistics mathematically.
The word
statistics, when referring to the scientific discipline, is singular, as in "Statistics is an art."This should not be confused with the word
statistic, referring to a quantity (such as
mean or
median) calculated from a set of data, whose plural is
statistics ("this statistic seems wrong" or "these statistics are misleading").
