Basic Concepts of Data and Error Analysis : With Introductions to Probability and Statistics and to Computer Methods

This introductory textbook explains the concepts and methods of data and error analysis needed for laboratory experiment write-ups, especially physics and engineering experiments. The book contains the material needed for beginning students, e.g., first year university students, college students (enrolled on a certificate or diploma course) and even A-level students. Nevertheless, it also covers the required material for higher year university laboratories, including the final year. Only essential concepts and methods needed for the day-to-day performance of experiments and their subsequent analysis and presentation are included and, at the same time, presented as simply as possible. Non-essential detail is avoided. Chapter five is a stand-alone introduction to probability and statistics aimed at providing a theoretical background to the data and error analysis chapters one to four. Computer methods are introduced in Chapter six. The author hopes this book will serve as a constant reference.

Prof. Panayiotis Nicos Kaloyerou was born on 22/11/1954 in Larnaka, Cyprus. He obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics in 1985 from Birkbeck College, London University, under the supervision of Prof. David Bohm, in which, based on Bohm's original idea, the Causal Interpretation of Boson Fields was developed. His first academic position was a Royal Society Fellowship held at the Institut Henri Poincaré (1987 - 1988). From 1990 - 1993, Kaloyerou held a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford. From 1993 to the present he has worked mostly in physics departments in Africa: The University of Swaziland (1993 - 1996), The University of Botswana (1996 - 2001), and The University of Zambia (2005 - present). His main publications include two Physics Reports articles: An Ontological Basis for the Quantum Theory: a Causal Interpretation of Quantum Fields, with D, Bohm and B. J. Hiley, (1987) and The Causal Interpretation of the Electromagnetic Field (1994).