What is Statistics?

Even though you may not have realized it, you probably have made some
statistical statements in your everyday conversation or thinking. Statements
like "I sleep for about eight hours per night on average" and "You are more
likely to pass the exam if you start preparing earlier" are actually statistical
in nature.
Statistics is a discipline which is concerned with:

designing experiments and other data collection,

summarizing information to aid understanding,
drawing conclusions from data, and
estimating the present or predicting the future.

The two statements at the beginning illustrate some of these points.

In making predictions, Statistics uses the companion subject of Probability,
which models chance mathematically and enables calculations of chance in
complicated cases.
Today, statistics has become an important tool in the work of many academic
disciplines such as medicine, psychology, education, sociology, engineering
and physics, just to name a few. Statistics is also important in many aspects
of society such as business, industry and government. Because of the
increasing use of statistics in so many areas of our lives, it has become very
desirable to understand and practice statistical thinking. This is important
even if you do not use statistical methods directly.

Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis,

interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. Statisticians
improve the quality of data with the design of experiments and survey
sampling. Statistics also provides tools for prediction and forecasting using
data and statistical models. Statistics is applicable to a wide variety of
academic disciplines, including natural and social sciences, government, and
business.

Statistical methods can be used to summarize or describe a collection of

data; this is called descriptive statistics. This is useful in research, when
communicating the results of experiments. In addition, patterns in the data
may be modeled in a way that accounts for randomness and uncertainty in
the observations, and are then used to draw inferences about the process or
population being studied; this is called inferential statistics. Inference is a
vital element of scientific advance, since it provides a prediction (based in
data) for where a theory logically leads. To further prove the guiding
theory, these predictions are tested as well, as part of the scientific
method. If the inference holds true, then the descriptive statistics of the
new data increase the soundness of that hypothesis. Descriptive statistics
and inferential statistics (a.k.a., predictive statistics) together comprise
applied statistics.[2]
There is also a discipline called mathematical statistics, which is concerned
with the theoretical basis of the subject.
The word statistics can either be singular or plural.[3] In its singular form,
statistics refers to the mathematical science discussed in this article. In its
plural form, statistics is the plural of the word statistic, which refers to a
quantity (such as a mean) calculated from a set of data.[4]
Statistics, branch of mathematics that deals with the collection,
organization, and analysis of numerical data and with such problems as
experiment design and decision making.