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I understand from my lecturer that variance an standard deviation are central to statistics.

I do not understand the signifigance of both values, except that both measures the variability, and variance is the square of standard deviation. Why is there a need for two standards then?

Why must sd be squared to obtain variance? Why can't it be sd cubed, or even sd square rooted? Wouldnt sd cubed give us a more esaggerated value, which is better?

Also, how were these standards invented? They seem so non intuitive to me, then just takig a value then taking the difference wrt to the mean

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    The nice thing about standard deviation, on the other hand, is that it scales like the random variable ($\sigma_{aX} = |a| \sigma_X$), so it has the same units as the random variable.2012-10-19

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Variance is one of the so called moments and plays a very important role in Statistics. To be more intuitive just imagine how would be a measure of variance if you just take the normalized sum of differences between all values around some central value: those differences who are negative will influence in a mistaken way your dispersion measurement.

There are many applications of these concepts. To cite one example: with standard variation, engineers can guarantee if 99% of all production of an industry will lay within a specified interval of tolerance.

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    If you need further information, see the [Central Limit Theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem)2012-10-19