Department of Mathematics
The University of Nebraska at Omaha
 
 
Special Event
 
What Do Statisticians Do?
 
Presenter:
Walt Stroup
Professor and Chair, UNL Department of Statistics
 
When:
Thursday, November 11, 2004, 4:00-5:15 PM
 
Where:
Durham Science Center 256
 
 

Statisticians are story-tellers. Not the kind of story-tellers President Truman referred to when he famously made his crack about “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.” However, just as an artist’s purpose is to tell a story with a picture and a musician’s is to tell a story with melody, harmony and rhythm, so a statistician’s job is to tell a story with numbers. Statistics is the science (and, often, art) of collecting,

analyzing, and interpreting data in order to transform the data into information – information that can be used to answer questions or make decisions. This talk will present examples of questions that motivate data collection and how statisticians think about

1) how best to collect informative data (because not all data are informative and some are misleading)

and

2) how to analyze and present data to make it informative.

My specialty areas are design of experiments and statistical modeling, so my talk will reflect, but not be confined to, those interests.

For questions, contact Dr. Dora Matache, DSC237, 554-3295, dmatache@mail.unomaha.edu