How to Love Statistics When You Haven't Done the Math: The underlying mathematical and other ideas that make (most of) it workable, wonderful and worth studying!

Half of all peer-reviewed journal articles misuse statistics.*

But which half?

Most people who study statistics don't fully understand the mathematical and other ideas behind it.

• Why does everything from the Age of children's first words to the concentration of Zinc in blood follow a 'normal distribution'? (If you've heard it is because of the 'Central Limit Theorem' you've been misled.)
• Why can a small study often give more helpful information than a large one?
• Which plausible and popular statistical practices are flawed, and should be abandoned? Why did they look like good ideas?
• Which implausible ideas are actually brilliant, and should be used more?

This book provides the missing bridge between the increasingly-separate worlds of statistics, mathematical statistics and mathematics, allowing you to understand why statistics works, not just which computing option to select. It assumes nothing except the ability to count, and takes you on a journey through the historical ideas behind statistics and the mathematical concepts that give it solid foundations.

(*According to at least two studies in different disciplines.)