This is part of the series: How Einstein Proved That Atoms Existed and How You Will Too. Which you can check out here and here
Averages and standard deviations are ways in which you can summarize the behavior of random things.
Before you can talk about these, you have two convert your random process from events to numbers.
For example, your set of outcomes could be O = {sunny, rain, snow}. You can convert that into X = {0, 1, 2}. You could’ve chosen a different set of number to describe your outcomes, but a different set will give you different averages. In this particular choice, the higher the number the less desirable the outcome (if you want to surf for example). Now you can describe each city by the average value of X, the lower this value the more you want to live there.
The problem is, knowing the average by itself can be deceiving. For example, if our set of outcomes was O = {extreme heat, nice and sunny, rain, snow, extreme cold}, two cities can have the same average but one is always nice and sunny, the other is always in one extreme. The standard deviation, gives us a measure of how much the weather jumps between extremes.
Watch the video for more insights into these two important measures.
