Episode 5: CERN and standard deviation

This week the topic was standard deviation. We interviewed Clara Nellist, who's a researcher at CERN Geneva, Switzerland. We talked to Clara about her work in the Large Hadron Collider and how she uses standard deviation as a measure of how reliable the results are. Interesting links: Large Hadron Collider on Wikipedia CERN website Standard deviation at Maths is Fun What is the Higgs Boson? at HowStuffWorks Accuracy versus precision by Matt Parker Puzzle: The heights of a group of people are measured, and the resulting data has mean 1.35m, and standard deviation 0.13m. Someone in the group is 180.5cm tall. How many standard deviations away from the mean are they? Solution: Their height is 180.5cm, which is 45.5cm away from the mean. This is 3.5 times the standard deviation of 13cm. Show/Hide