Statistics is the science of collecting, analyzing, interpreting, presenting, and organizing data.
Statistics is divided into descriptive statistics (summarizing data through means, medians, standard deviations, and graphs) and inferential statistics (drawing conclusions about populations from samples). Key concepts include probability distributions, hypothesis testing, correlation, regression, and confidence intervals.
Statistics has roots in 17th-century "political arithmetic" by John Graunt and William Petty. The term "statistics" comes from German "Statistik" referring to state data. Key contributors include Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher.