Mean, Median, and Mode

mean, median, and mode, in mathematics, the three principal ways of designating the average value of a list of numbers. The arithmetic mean is found by adding the numbers and dividing the sum by the number of numbers in the list. This is what is most often meant by an average. The median is the middle value in a list ordered from smallest to largest. The mode is the most frequently occurring value on the list.

There are other types of means. A geometric mean is found by multiplying all values in a list and then taking the root of that product equal to the number of values (e.g., the square root if there are two numbers). The geometric mean is typically used in cases of exponential growth or decline (see exponential function). In statistics, the mean of a random variable is its expected value—i.e., the theoretical long-run arithmetic mean of the outcomes of repeated trials, such as a large number of tosses of a die. For data that is grouped together (e.g., where values are 1–5, 6–10,…), the methods used for calculating the mean, median, and mode are different from those used for ungrouped data (e.g., where values are 1, 2, 3,…).