ABSTRACT
This chapter briey reviews some basic mathematical and statistical concepts that are fundamental to the material that comes later. Readers familiar with the mathematical notation commonly used to dene summary statistics and with simple statistical tests, such as the t-test, can treat this chapter as optional revision or as reference material. We rst introduce two commonly used statistics, the sample mean and sample variance, and in doing so dene the mathematical notation we use throughout the rest of the book (Section 2.1). We then review random variables and probability distributions with particular reference to the Binomial distribution for discrete variables and the Normal distribution for continuous variables (Section 2.2). Later, we discuss statistical inference (Section 2.3), review one-and two-sample t-tests (Section 2.4), and discuss the concept of correlation (and covariance) between two variables (Section 2.5). To complete this chapter, we describe our conventions for presentation of calculations and numerical results (Section 2.6).
