ABSTRACT
Chaos theory relies heavily on several conventional concepts from statistics and probability theory. This chapter reviews the more relevant ones.
In statistics, a population is any well defmed group of things. The group can be small or large. Examples are all the peanuts in a particular bag, students in your local school, and people in a country. For practical reasons, we usually can't or don't look at an entire population. Instead, we measure and evaluate just a sample of that population. Then we assume that the characteristics of the sample represent those of the population. One of the most important characteristics of a population or sample is its central tendency. Most aspects of chaos theory use the arithmetic mean (one of several possible measures) to indicate that central tendency. The arithmetic mean is just the sum of all the values divided by the number of observations. The chaos literature expresses that process and many related processes in symbols, as follows.
