专业描述

Statistics, the science of decision making under uncertainty, is driven by data. The mission of the field of statistics is to serve science and society through the development, understanding, abstraction, and communication of state-of-the art techniques for collecting, analyzing, and making inferences from data. It is an explosive time for statistics with no shortage of new and novel data types in need of theoretical and applied study. Statistics has been called the "quintessential" inter-disciplinary science because statisticians enthusiastically reach out to all areas of science, engineering and education in the pursuit of interesting and important problems. Statisticians are interpreters of the vast accumulation of facts and figures available today. They design and implement studies to collect data (e.g. numbers, images, information), then analyze and explain those data to subject area specialists and to laymen. Statisticians, as experts, have virtually unlimited opportunities. Monitoring the environment, developing new vaccines, making more reliable products, growing crops more efficiently, and setting actuarial rates are just some endeavors in which statisticians have had a significant impact. The success of Statistics at Kansas State is directly linked to its collaboration with interdisciplinary scientists, faculty, staff, graduate students, and alumni. The discipline of statistics has been changing rapidly, particularly within the last ten years, where imaginative use of computing power and computational environments have driven much of the current theoretical and applied research. Maintaining successful and active collaboration has required the faculty to aggressively incorporate the trends of modern statistics in all aspects of their careers. The outcome is a nationally distinguished faculty and degree program.