Editing Arithmetic mean (section)

==History==
The statistician [[Churchill Eisenhart]], senior researcher fellow at the [[National Institute of Standards and Technology|U. S. National Bureau of Standards]], traced the history of the arithmetic mean in detail. In the modern age it started to be used as a way of combining various observations that should be identical, but were not such as estimates of the direction of magnetic north.
In 1635 the mathematician [[Henry Gellibrand]] described as “meane” the midpoint of a lowest and highest number, not quite the arithmetic mean. In 1668, a person known as “DB” was quoted in the [[Transactions of the Royal Society]] describing “taking the mean” of five values:<ref>{{cite web |last1=Eisenhart |first1=Churchill |title=The Development of the Concept of the Best Mean of a Set of Measurements from Antiquity to the Present Day |url=https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/eisenhart.pdf |publisher=Presidential Address, 131st Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, Colorado State University |pages=68–69 |date=24 August 1971}}</ref>
{{quote|In this Table, he [Capt. Sturmy] notes the greatest difference to be 14 minutes; and so taking the mean for the true Variation, he concludes it then and there to be just 1. deg. 27. min.|D.B. p. 726}}