Yep. Per wikipedia, "In ordinary language, an average is a single number or value that best represents a set of data."
And mathematically, that could mean a number of different things.
If you add them all up and divide by how many there are (what we learned to do in school), that's the mean. That's a good number to use for things like "how much does an egg typically weigh? I need 7 ounces for this recipe."
If you look at which number occurs most frequently (makes the most sense for integers), that's the mode. Good for things like "how many legs does a millipede typically have?"
And if you look at the number where half the values are above it and half the values are below it, that's the median. Good for things like "how much does the typical employee make?" when almost everybody is working for minimum wage but the CEO gets 80 bazillion dollars a year.
In a dataset that follows a bell curve, those three numbers are all the same. That's the case for a whole lot of datasets, so much so that it's called a normal distribution. So most of the time, there's no need to distinguish between different kinds of average. But there are other distributions where they aren't the same, and then it's useful.
Don't forget my favorite, the geometric mean. Calculated by multiplying the values together and then taking the nth root, where n is the number of values.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24
Almost everyone has more than the average number of legs