ABSTRACT
Data analysis is a fundamental activity in physics, as well as other sciences. This chapter shows physicists how to use Mathematica to analyze numerical data. It discusses the use of "two column" data, where the first column is some control variable and the second a measured value. The chapter describes reading in data from a file, and making histograms to graphically represent the data. The Mathematica Documentation Center has a section on "Data Manipulation & Analysis", including a number of guides and tutorials such as "Handling Arrays of Data". A data set might consist of two or more correlated lists. There are a variety of built-in data analysis tools that allow physicists to combine lists and explore correlations, but physicists can also do a lot just by using simple list manipulation. The concept behind data selection in Mathematica is simple, but the execution can be hard to follow at first.
