A Student's Guide to Data and Error Analysis

Herman Berendsen is Emeritus Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research started in nuclear magnetic resonance but focused later on molecular dynamics simulations on systems of biological interest. He is one of the pioneers in this field and, with over 35,000 citations, is one of the most quoted authors in physics and chemistry. He has taught courses in molecular modeling worldwide and authored the book Simulating the Physical World (Cambridge, 2007).

Part I. Data and Error Analysis: 1. Introduction; 2. The presentation of physical quantities with their inaccuracies; 3. Errors: classification and propagation; 4. Probability distributions; 5. Processing of experimental data; 6. Graphical handling of data with errors; 7. Fitting functions to data; 8. Back to Bayes: knowledge as a probability distribution; Answers to exercises; Part II. Appendices: A1. Combining uncertainties; A2. Systematic deviations due to random errors; A3. Characteristic function; A4. From binomial to normal distributions; A5. Central limit theorem; A6. Estimation of the varience; A7. Standard deviation of the mean; A8. Weight factors when variances are not equal; A9. Least squares fitting; Part III. Python Codes; Part IV. Scientific Data: Chi-squared distribution; F-distribution; Normal distribution; Physical constants; Probability distributions; Student's t-distribution; Units.