Introduction to Error Analysis

Taylor's guide to measurement uncertainty begins with ground that anyone who has worked with wood or tools will recognize: the carpenter's routine decisions about how precise a cut or reading must be. From there it turns to well-known experiments from the history of science, where recognizing and handling errors determined whether the work succeeded.

The book is aimed at students of the physical sciences and engineering, who are expected to return to it as a resource. It covers how uncertainties combine when a result is calculated from measured quantities, the statistics of repeated measurements, the Gaussian distribution, and methods for fitting data.