Calculating the Standard Deviation -

Formula 1

Well, there it is! The first formula for calculating the standard deviation.
Firstly, I had better explain those curious heiroglyphs, and then we will go
through how the formula is turned into a set of instructions:
Click here

Explanation of the Terms

x. Normally in mathematics, letters such as "x" stand for single
numbers. In this case, the letter actually stands for an
entire list of numbers - every single number in the list whose
standard deviation we are trying to find. We use each of these
numbers in turn when we calculate the standard deviation,
although we just write them as one letter in the formula. In some
text books you may see this written asxi, or something similar, to
show that it stands for a list of numbers: x1, x2, x3 etc.
. The little line on top of the x is called a "bar", so we
pronounce this symbol as "x bar". It simply means the arithmetic
mean of all the numbers in the list - i.e. add them together and
divide by N, where N is how many numbers there are.
N. Didn't I just tell you this one? N stands for how many
numbers there are in the list, i.e. if we are trying to find the
standard deviation of 1420 numbers, then N = 1420.
Σ . This is the other version of the Greek "sigma" - the upper
case letter. It has a standard meaning in mathematics, namely
"add up a list of numbers". (They use the Greek letter S because
it represents Sum, i.e. add together).
What the formula means
This is where we interpret the formula step by step. There are
six basic steps. As I list each one, I shall demonstrate it with the
following list of numbers:
4, 1, 0, 2, 1, 5, 2, 3, 4, 3
The first thing we must do is to calculate the arithmetic

mean of the list of numbers.

4+1+0+2+1+5+2+3+4+
25
= 3 = = 2.5
10
10

Now we subtract the mean value from all the numbers in the
list. This gives us the following list of numbers:
1.5, -1.5, -2.5, -0.5, -1.5, 2.5, -0.5, 0.5, 1.5, 0.5
You will notice that some of the numbers are negative, and some
positive. This is to be expected, as the mean value is a value
which is roughly half way through the list of numbers, so when
you subtract it from every number in the list, you would expect
it to produce a negative answer roughly half the time.
In algebraic terms, we write the following:
x-
 To counteract all the effects of those negative signs, we
square the numbers in that list that we just obtained. Squaring a
negative number has the effect of removing the minus sign, but
we square all the numbers, not just the negative ones:
2.25, 2.25, 6.25, 0.25, 2.25, 6.25, 0.25, 0.25,
2.25, 0.25
You will notice that squaring the first two numbers of the list
(1.5 and -1.5) gives exactly the same thing. Again, we can add
this squaring to the formula that we are gradually building up:
(x - )2

This is where we come to the "Sigma" part. We now have to

add all those squared differences together to get a single
number:
2.25 + 2.25 + 6.25 + 0.25 + 2.25 + 6.25 + 0.25 +
0.25 + 2.25 + 0.25 = 22.5
We symbolise adding the numbers together by putting the
"Sigma" sign in front of the list of numbers in the algebraic
expression:
Σ (x - )2

The penultimate step is to divide the sum that we got in the

previous step by N (or N - 1 if you are using the unbiased
version), which you may recall, is the number of items in the
list. This gives a number which we call the Variance, and which
we represent by the symbol σ 2. In this case, there are 10 items
in the list, so we divide 22.5 by 10:
Variance, σ 2 22.5
= 2.25
= 10
Again, we can write all this algebraically:
Σ (x -
Variance, σ 2
)2
=
N

You will probably have noticed that the symbol for the
variance is the same sigma that we used to represent the
standard deviation, except that it is squared. That is perfectly
true - the variance is the standard deviation squared, and all we
need to do to the variance is square root it:
Standard deviation, σ = √Variance = √2.25 =
1.5
Applying the square root to the formula for the variance gives us
the complete formula for standard deviation which you saw at
the top of this page:

In this case, it gives a fairly simple number - the standard

deviation happens to be 1.5 - but in most cases, it will give a
nasty never-ending square root.