| Summary: | "This book is intended primarily as a text for a one- or two- semester course for students who have had little or no previous calculus or statistics. It has two main purposes: 1. To develop some basic mathematico-logical concepts of statistics, particularly the logic of statistical inference. 2. To develop an understanding of the language used in mathematical statistics, including elementary calculus. It is assumed that understanding must include some facility in reading compact mathematical expressions and in applying mathematical theorems to empirical problems without extended explanations of what the theorems mean. This approach is based on the premise that the college student, whether oriented toward applications or toward mathematics, can best spend his time and energy in a first course in statistics in mastering some of the abstract concepts, i.e., mathematical models, and some of the mathematical language of the field. Because of the stress on abstract definitions and mathematical models, applications have for the most part been subordinated; in many cases examples and exercises have deliberately been made trivial so as not to detract from the abstract structure. All data in this text are hypothetical, though many of them are characteristic of those actually obtained"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).
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