SUMMARY

Some of the facts of probability and statistics including special distributions relevant to nuclear measurements have been summarized. Examples of the nuclear applications of stochastic processes have also been given. A separate Section has been devoted to the analysis of nuclear spectra.

Louis Lyons writes in the preface of his book (Lyons 1986) that one cannot learn statistics simply by reading a book on the subject . Since reading a chapter would be of not much help either, we must be content with summarizing the relevant facts of probability and statistics and pointing out possible connections with nuclear measurements. As regards sampling distributions, parameter estimation etc. we refer to the above monograph as well as to Press et al. 1999. We will only make an exception with the ? ² distribution, which is a valuable goodness-of-fit tool in nuclear spectroscopy. We will also cite a few examples of the nuclear applications of stochastic processes, a field usually excluded from short studies of this type.

Nuclear aspects (as well as some other important points of reference) will be phrased in the forms of remarks numbered like this: (#1), (#2), etc. Such remarks also serve occasionally as interface between the (mathematical) terminology used in this chapter and the terminologies used by other authors coming from different fields of nuclear science. The remarks also help to follow a train of thought that is unfolded over several sections or...