Standard deviation (represented by the symbol )

Sigma (upper case , lower case , lower case in word-final position ;) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. The standard deviation of a random variable, statistical population, data set, or probability distribution is the square root of its variance. Standard deviation shows how much variation or "dispersion" exists from the average (mean, or expected value). A low standard deviation indicates that the data points tend to be very close to the mean, where as high standard deviation indicates that the data points are spread out over a large range of values. The general standard deviation

Basic example
Consider a population consisting of the following eight values:

These eight data points have the mean (average) of 5:

To calculate the population standard deviation, first compute the difference of each data point from the mean, and square the result of each :

Next compute the average of these values, and take the square root:

This quantity is the population standard deviation; it is equal to the square root of the variance. The formula is valid only if the eight values we began with form the complete population. If they instead were a random sample, drawn from some larger, "parent" population, then we should have used 7 (which is n 1) instead of 8 (which is n) in the denominator of the last formula, and then the quantity thus obtained would have been called the sample standard deviation.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation --------------------