Arthur Lyon Bowley Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

Perhaps statisticians themselves have not always fully recognized the limitations of their work.

Arthur Lyon Bowley
A knowledge of statistics is like a knowledge of foreign languages or of algebra; it may prove of use at any time under any circumstances.

Arthur Lyon Bowley
Of itself an arithmetic average is more likely to conceal than to disclose important facts; it is the nature of an abbreviation, and is often an excuse for laziness.

Arthur Lyon Bowley
The chemist experimenting in his laboratory is like the statistician; the chemist theorising in his study is like the economist.

Arthur Lyon Bowley
A statistical estimate may be good or bad, accurate or the reverse; but in almost all cases it is likely to be more accurate than a casual observer's impression, and the nature of things can only be disproved by statistical methods.

Arthur Lyon Bowley
Great numbers are not counted correctly to a unit, they are estimated; and we might perhaps point to this as a division between arithmetic and statistics, that whereas arithmetic attains exactness, statistics deals with estimates, sometimes very accurate, and very often sufficiently so for their purpose, but never mathematically exact.

Arthur Lyon Bowley
Very many definitions have been given of the word statistics, and each author who has written on the subject has assigned new limits to the field which should be included in its scope.

Arthur Lyon Bowley
The statistician's contribution to a sociological problem is only one of objective measurement, and this is frequently among the less important of the data; it is as necessary, however, to its solution as accurate measurements are for the construction of a building.

Arthur Lyon Bowley
Great numbers and the averages resulting from them, such as we always obtain in measuring social phenomena, have great inertia.

Arthur Lyon Bowley