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How is the range of a data set found?
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probability and statistics
Swiss commemorative stamp of mathematician Jakob Bernoulli, issued 1994, displaying the formula and the graph for the law of large numbers, first proved by Bernoulli in 1713.
In statistics, the range is the simplest measure of variability for a quantitative data set. It is found by calculating the difference between the largest value and the smallest value in the data set.1
Because it is determined solely by these two extreme values, it provides a quick, albeit limited, indication of the spread of the data compared to more comprehensive measures like variance or standard deviation, which account for every value in the set.1