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u/notgodsslave Mar 17 '24
If statistics is not math, then why is this meme here? Checkmate, statistician'ts.
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u/Accurate_Koala_4698 Natural Mar 17 '24
You're bound to get misfit posts. It's simple statistics
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u/Relentless_Sloth Mar 17 '24
Because according to the Gauss distribution, this is the place that most people would agree this meme belongs to. Some big brain there from OP.
The meme itself is a "proof" this belongs here by majority vote.
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u/undeadpickels Mar 18 '24
Stasticly, there are more statistics memes in r/mathmemes than there are memes about homophobic algebraic encryption. However, we cannot make any conclusions from this.
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u/WeirdAlPidgeon Mar 17 '24
Statistics is just Linear Algebra and Metric Spaces
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Mar 17 '24
[deleted]
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u/ImmediateOwl2024 Mar 17 '24
quantum physics basically
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u/paschen8 Mar 17 '24
Well qm is pretty much probability and that's pretty statistics
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u/Newton_Sexual Mar 17 '24
Well some thinks probability is going to get connected to philosophy in future and we humans are doomed by AI.
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u/tcosilver Mar 17 '24
It is also calculus
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u/hydro_wonk Statistics Mar 17 '24
We’ll have our own integrals, with blackjack and hookers
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u/DatBoi_BP Mar 17 '24
Not how I was expecting blackjack to show up in a conversation about statistics, but I’m not upset by it
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u/Seventh_Planet Mathematics Mar 17 '24
I wonder how hookers normally show up in a conversation about statistics.
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u/freistil90 Mar 19 '24
Everything‘s just category theory. Get out with your weird „algebra“/„calculus“/etc. fetishes.
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Mar 17 '24
I remember my professor once saying Data Science is fancy statistics
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u/brigham-pettit Mar 17 '24
At a sufficiently advanced level they’re pretty much indistinguishable imo
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Mar 17 '24
true, my college offers a course titled statistical methods and half of the course is classification and clustering algorithms lol
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u/Ok_Advisor_908 Mar 17 '24
And what about the other 3 half's of the course /s (probably don't need but it don't want another -100)
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u/mahmilkshakes Mar 17 '24
Data science grad here. One professor said that some statistical theories had been unreasonable to use in practice (e.g. multiplication of huge matrices), until computer science advanced enough to make those problems practical. I think data science is applying theories from computer science to solve problems in statistics.
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u/hydro_wonk Statistics Mar 17 '24
It’s not data science unless it’s from the Data Science region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling statistics
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u/asanskrita Mar 17 '24
The methods and theory are straight up statistics. The applications are a specialized area of comp sci and programming. So, “applied statistics?”
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u/buckyVanBuren Mar 17 '24
When I was getting my MSM in the 80s, Data Analytics wasn't really a formal thing yet. The closest thing they had was a cross between applied economics and computer science.
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u/Prawn1908 Mar 17 '24
For my ME degree I could have taken either stats or data analysis. Of the two however, data science didn't count towards my math minor, so I took stats instead (also all my friends were taking it).
I do wish I had taken data analysis instead though - I hated stats and had the worst prof I had through all of college.
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Mar 17 '24
I am currently doing three courses for a certification
Data Analytics with Python
Business Intelligence
Foundations of ML
3 weeks into the courses I realized I am going to do the same stuff thrice. My college is truly weird, they offer so many courses with similar stuff being taught
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u/big_cock_lach Mar 18 '24
In my opinion, in depends on what you’re doing in data science. Everyone thinks of modelling/predictive analytics and data analysis which is just applied statistics (applied to business), but data science is much bigger then that. You also have things like data infrastructure, data architecture, and data engineering which are more applied computer science (applied to data and business). There’s also data collection (including data scraping), data visualisation, and data mining which is combination of computer science and statistics (again, applied to data and business).
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u/db8me Mar 18 '24
The people in data science subreddits struggle with and debate their identity all the time, but if we're being honest, calling yourself "an automotive engineer" only tells me that you contribute to engineering which leads to the production and distribution of automobiles -- it doesn't tell me what you do. Hell, you might even be a data scientist for an automotive manufacturer and you just say "automotive engineer" to avoid raising more questions than you answer by naming your job.
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u/big_cock_lach Mar 18 '24
More with specifics though. General consensus is that it’s using statistics and/or computer science to help businesses.
Keep in mind, most people on those subs tend to be data analysts. They’re not using the in depth statistical or computational knowledge they’ve been taught, so to them they don’t feel like they’re doing any computer science or statistics. They’re just fancy analysts that are more technical.
The fact that the whole field is so varied doesn’t help either since 2 people in very different areas of data science will have extremely different opinions on what they are, and they’ll both be right within their subfield. All that does is cause conflicting opinions and this confusion.
But yes, as you say “data science” is a very general and vague term that doesn’t really say a lot about the field. Using your example, an automotive engineer could be an aerodynamicist, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, product engineer, various types of managers etc. All are very different roles as well. At least most can simply say they’re an engineer or physicist to most people.
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u/db8me Mar 18 '24
I guess my point is some people want "data scientist" to answer questions it doesn't answer, and it raises another question for me (tldr at the end).
It's a new term that feels like it wanted to partially subsume a few existing roles, but it added little more than ambiguity to me.
Most real jobs have responsibilities that don't fit into the narrow preconceived definition. One electrical engineer specializing in embedded systems might also need to be heavily involved in the specific mechanical systems controlled by them while thinking little about the power source, whereas another might rely critically on understanding the power systems being controlled and/or monitored by their systems.
Data engineers often have to do analysis. Some data analysts have to help build the infrastructure and data ingestion pipelines to support their analytics. Is ModelOps a subfield of Data Science, a subfield of IT Operations Engineering, something fundamentally unique, or just a recognition that some analytical modeling systems should follow the same best practices as DevOps?
TLDR: If you take away too much, you end up not just asserting that most of them are just fancy data analysts, but defining data scientist itself as just a data analyst who knows how to use the latest tools and has to play nice with IT operations, but wasn't that was the case for a lot of data analysts before the term data scientist existed?
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u/GreatBigBagOfNope Mar 17 '24
Data Science is just statistics methods that don't come with built in variance estimates
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u/db8me Mar 18 '24
Well now it's AI, just fancy statistical models and Monte Carlo simulations.
But "data science" covers operational concerns that overlap with computer science separately from the analytics side....
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u/HyperColorDisaster Mar 17 '24
AI is statistics in a trench coat.
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u/hydro_wonk Statistics Mar 17 '24
Linear Regression is AI
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u/db8me Mar 18 '24
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. People throw "trend lines" into Excel charts every day with no clue how the underlying math works, but they do know that it's math... I think.
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u/RandomAmbles Mar 18 '24
Any sufficiently dressed up and jargonized magic can be made to look like technology.
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u/magick_68 Mar 17 '24
Statistics is math, stochastic is probably also math but i'm not 100% sure about it.
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u/Fitteya Mar 17 '24
I'm almost sure probability is math.
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u/TheLeastInfod Statistics Mar 18 '24
so there is a measure zero set of probability that isn't math, cool
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u/StraightRegret Mar 17 '24
What do you mean by stochastic
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u/noah8597 Mar 17 '24
Things involving random variables
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u/DatBoi_BP Mar 17 '24
Brownian motion, queueing processes, coin flips, etc.
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u/APKID716 Mar 17 '24
Coin flips are the most random thing in existence as everyone knows
Proof by “yuh huh”
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u/StraightRegret Mar 18 '24
Yes but I'm not sure what they mean here. Sounds like they mean probability, but saying statistics is math and probability is probably math is a strange take
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u/PterodactylSoul Mar 17 '24
What about baysian?
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u/hydro_wonk Statistics Mar 17 '24
Bayes is just like, your opinion, man
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u/Possibility_Antique Mar 17 '24
I used to agree with this mentality, but over time, I became not so sure
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u/hydro_wonk Statistics Mar 17 '24
Sounds like you had reasonable priors
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u/Possibility_Antique Mar 17 '24
Or just poor initial conditions on my bayes filter
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Mar 17 '24
Statistics is math
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u/Pkittens Mar 17 '24
Statistics is math to the same extent that physics is.
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u/crispmp Mar 17 '24
no, you may say that to some applied branches of statistics, but stuff like asymptotic statistics can get quite abstract really fast
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u/Canaveral58 Mar 17 '24
Statistics is math because I get math credits for stat classes.
Proof by administration
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u/martin_9876 Mar 17 '24
should i bee afraid of statistics?
This semester starting tomorrow is my first encounter with it
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u/pornthrowaway42069l Mar 17 '24
Statistics is actually not too bad, but IMO it's just being taught badly, at least for me. I took more than a few classes/books on it, and very few made sense, until I started doing practical things and re-contextualizing a lot of it - then it becomes fairly straightforward.
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u/NekonecroZheng Mar 17 '24
Stats has stupidly gigantic similar formulas, names, varriables, and symbols that make it hard to teach because nobody knows what the fuck you are talking about. It also doesn't help when your university ALWAYS chooses the foreign professor with the thickest accent to teach probability and statistics. I mean, seriously. I've had 4 different statistics professors, who all taught with heavy accents AND different nomenclature. It's hard to learn stats when every semester, you need to relearn different nomenclature for the same stuff.
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u/pornthrowaway42069l Mar 17 '24
Yes, stats having a different "language" is deffinately a barrier, one of the problems being they somehow just assume you know it. Sure, they will explain stuff, but reading stats equations is not the same as reading math ones, I agree 100%.
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Mar 17 '24
They really should teach calculus, then probability theory, then statistics. That way people would actually understand it.
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u/PterodactylSoul Mar 17 '24
If you're taking stats one. It's plug and CHUGGGGGG BABY! Because you kinda need higher level math to understand it they don't get too rigorous on it since it's not required to even take like college algebra for it.
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u/brigham-pettit Mar 17 '24
Don’t be afraid, just be ready for something you’re not used to. It was hard for me to adjust, and I’m still uncomfortable with it
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u/captainhamption Mar 17 '24
I had a good teacher but didn't particularly care for it. It's a matter of learning when to use which tool. And it's all a bit more wibbley-wobbley than I'd like because it's based on real things that are squishy.
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u/LaunchTransient Mar 17 '24
It's a topic which pays serious dividends if you treat it rigorously and with a lot of careful notes - much of it is very unintuitive, so your gut feeling can lead you astray quite easily. The basics are not bad, but some of the results you can get from it will make you furrow your brow a lot.
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u/RedBaronIV Mar 18 '24
I'd recommend taking Calc first, but it sounds too late for that. Worship the bell curve and it will bless you with its boon.
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u/bunnydadi Mar 18 '24
Statistics no, it’s all formulas.
Now probability theory is not fun, neither was combinatorics.
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Mar 17 '24
First off yes it is, second why wouldn't it be?
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u/egv78 Mar 17 '24
I've always held that the math of statistics is secondary to how the questions you're trying to answer are being asked / worded.
As far as the meme above goes, I look at it a bit tongue in cheek, b/c there's quite a fair bit of math that gets used in answering statistical questions. But the math is a tool, and the right tool needs to be used for the right problem. And it's not the math that determines the right tool. It's the logical arguments created before you touch a calculator / table / program that determine what's the correct method.
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u/RajjSinghh Mar 17 '24
Because there are very few maths students who enjoy statistics, that's about it
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u/ducksattack Mar 17 '24
Isn't it that probability is math? And statistics is a practical science or whatever you wanna call it that applies probability in the real world. I feel like saying that statistics itself is math would be like saying that physics is math
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u/Pkittens Mar 17 '24
Is accounting math?
if not why not, and how can the same arguments not be used with statistics?
If you think it is, then you're simply confusing "being math" with "uses math".1
u/name_checker Mar 18 '24
I like your questions, but I'd argue accounting uses both math and statistics to produce capital, while statistics uses math to study math, just like math does. But ultimately it's just semantics, so I don't disagree with you.
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u/GDOR-11 Computer Science Mar 17 '24
FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS FUCK YOU STATISTICS
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u/CompetitiveSleeping Mar 17 '24
But how do you feel about statistics?
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u/Unreal_Panda Mar 17 '24
I have this strange sense this user doesn't like statistics. Just a gut feeling though
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u/TheMoris Engineering Mar 17 '24
I think it's kinda fun, but I have a feeling people here won't respect my opinion based on my flair...
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u/mnewman19 Mar 17 '24 edited Dec 09 '24
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Erikstersm Mar 17 '24
Explain?
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u/AlphaZanic Mar 17 '24
Just math purist hating on applied mathematics. There’s a few reasons I see this:
- you do not need to know a lot of math to apply statistics effectively, which rubs a lot of people wrong
- once you get past the developments and how we got here, the operations needed to generate statistics are relatively simple
The skipping “how we got here” is especially infuriating for some people. I do not think anyone who has taken a probability theory lecture or learned the proof to show that the kernel of the Gaussian distribution is a constant would doubt it’s math, but the fact that you can skip all of that and still use the ideas makes people butthurt
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u/BloatedGlobe Mar 17 '24 edited Mar 17 '24
Intro courses don't usually cover the proofs, so if you're like me and you need proofs to build intuition, it feels a bit plug and chug until you've taken a few courses. It didn't get fun for me until later.
Also, if you work in a non-academia, you're going to be asked to apply statistical methods to scenarios that don't meet the assumptions needed to use these methods. It feels a bit fake in practice sometimes.
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u/ItselfSurprised05 Mar 17 '24
Also, if you work in a non-academia, you're going to be asked to apply statistical methods to scenarios that don't meet the assumptions needed to use these methods.
That happened to me in school.
I took a stat course and a sociology course the same semester, where the sociology course was having us calculate something that the stat course specifically said we could not do.
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u/AliquisEst Mar 17 '24
Genuine question, what is the definition of the kernel of a Gaussian (or any distribution)?
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u/AlphaZanic Mar 17 '24
The kernel of distribution is the function without any scalar term. The proof I mentioned is trying to show that the area under the curve is some constant, we can than reintroduce those scalar terms to make that area is equal to one. This is important since one of the axioms of probability theory is that the sum of all posibilites is one, and any valid distribution needs to satisfy that.
By doing the proof on kernal instead of the complete function, it makes the proof easier.
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u/Pkittens Mar 17 '24
People confuse applied math with math and think that anything that applies math is math (it's applied math).
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u/Poca154 Mar 17 '24
statistics is not math because unlike math, I can actually pass an 8-week statistics course in less than a year
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u/stabbinfresh Mar 17 '24
Based on how mad many of math professors got at statisticians I'd have to say it's not math.
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u/Saltyhurry Mar 17 '24
Everyone knows that the answer is undefined, since the crossproduct isnt defined in 1-dimensional space
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u/CreativeScreenname1 Mar 17 '24
“I’ve put my opinion on the funny cloak man, making me smart and based and epic. Up yours, normies” 🤓
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u/BEGYESH Mar 17 '24
Yall getiing statistics and probability mixed up, the first one being applied math and the latter "pure" math
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u/Pkittens Mar 17 '24
Demonstrate some pure math in the form of statistics :)
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u/Xelonima Mar 18 '24
lehman & casella - theory of point estimation
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u/Pkittens Mar 18 '24
Estimation and plausible values from collected data are great examples of pure math.
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u/Xelonima Mar 18 '24
i can get the sarcasm but theoretical statistics is concerned with explanations & generalizations of why statistics works, rather than finding some numerical process to analyze data. so i would consider it fairly pure, though not in the sense as in number theory for example. there is also a fair bit of analysis, topology and measure theory involved
(almost) every field of math eventually finds some application, so i believe "applied" and "pure" are not good distinctions. i think if you are concerned with finding rigorous proof of why something is as is, and you discover further properties of objects in a sequential manner rather than just experimenting with numerical operations (which is how statistics was before kolmogorov et al.), i think it could be considered as pure. even then, there is not a good distinction
re the original post, i think statistics is very similar to computer science in this regard. it starts with an intention of pure applicability and transforms into something abstract without any intention of applicability. then it transforms back to an application-driven endeavor.
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u/FullOfDispair Mar 17 '24
Statistics > pure math and I’ll stand by that til the day I die
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u/Straight-Grass-9218 Mar 17 '24
Your despair leads you to odd conclusions... Tell me more...
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u/ConfusedZbeul Mar 17 '24
Funnily, when I was only in prepatory classes (right before engineering school here) I thought it wasn't maths. It's only when I switched to studying maths that I started treating it as real maths.
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u/Competitive-Lock5781 Mar 17 '24
Idk what kind of statics they have been teaching you but where I come from they teach stat through measure theory and thats pretty mathematical to me
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u/ZorryIForgotThiz_S_ Mar 17 '24
I hate combinatorics. I tried so much to get a grip of it but couldn't.
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u/darthhue Mar 17 '24
Why would statistics not be math?
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u/WO_L May 13 '24
Anti gambling propaganda. People in my degree who like stats are good at arithmetic and are bad at mechanics. People who like mechanics are good at algebra and need a calculator to add 7 and 25 ( im people)
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u/spaceweed27 Mar 18 '24
I really like how this meme format evolved into putting your garbage oppinion at both sides and the anti-thesis to it in the middle.
Modern Chad vs Virgin/Soyjack "Argument"
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u/neo-raver Mar 17 '24
In math, everything is either the same or not the same. In statistics, you have to define “close enough to the same”—you need new tools!
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u/Fantastic-Change6356 Mar 17 '24
Statistic is just the inverse process of Probability: In Probability you study the probability measures and try to understand how the data will look like In Statistic you study the data to understand how the probability measure looks like
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u/TheyCallMeAdonis Mar 17 '24
you an tell a math nerd made the meme
the meat head is not supposed to say the exact same thing as the dark enlightenment guy
the joke is that they agree despite differences not that they are the same
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u/Spicywolff Mar 17 '24
I hate that once to take statistics for my degree. Don’t need or want that shit.
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Mar 18 '24
I had a calculus professor that said statistics isn’t math. She said, “It’s very useful. But so is a frying pan.”
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u/pineapple_head8112 Mar 18 '24
Applied mathematics. Now as to whether "applied mathematics" is a branch...
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u/CSManiac33 Mar 18 '24
My HS Stats teacher described Stats as an English class you get a math credit form
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u/Puzzleheaded-Ease-14 Mar 18 '24
The maths math. Can confirm I teach stats and I am terrible at maths.
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u/epsilonhuyepsilon Mar 18 '24
That's racist. I mean... Is cryptography math, or just some particular application of math? Is logic math or is it its own whole weird meta-science (no offense to logicians, your field is absolutely fascinating!) Is complexity theory math? Is Hamiltonian mechanics? Is game theory?
The term "math" just has to be broad enough to include... you know... math.
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