Cambridge, United Kingdom

Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: mathematics and statistics
University website: www.cam.ac.uk
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Mathematical Statistics
Mathematical statistics is the application of mathematics to statistics, as opposed to techniques for collecting statistical data. Mathematical techniques which are used for this include mathematical analysis, linear algebra, stochastic analysis, differential equations, and measure-theoretic probability theory.
Mathematics
Mathematics (from Greek μάθημα máthēma, "knowledge, study, learning") is the study of such topics as quantity, structure, space, and change. It has no generally accepted definition.
Pure Mathematics
Broadly speaking, pure mathematics is mathematics that studies entirely abstract concepts. This has been a recognizable category of mathematical activity from the 19th century onwards, at variance with the trend towards meeting the needs of navigation, astronomy, physics, economics, engineering, and so on.
Statistics
Statistics is a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data. In applying statistics to, for example, a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model process to be studied. Populations can be diverse topics such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with all aspects of data including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments. See glossary of probability and statistics.
Pure Mathematics
Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true … If our hypothesis is about anything, and not about some one or more particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this definition, and will probably agree that it is accurate.
Bertrand Russell, Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics, published in International Monthly, vol. 4 (1901).
Statistics
The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the art of statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service.
Attributed to Florence Nightingale by F.N. David in Games, Gods, and Gambling: A History of Probability and Statistical Ideas, 1962, page 103.
Statistics
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write.
Attributed to H. G. Wells by Darrell Huff in How to Lie with Statistics (1954), epigraph The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write. [HG Wells 1911, Mankind in the Making 2041]
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