Talk:Degrees of freedom

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In the ancient past, I failed a statistics class in which the professor blathered on about degrees of freedom as though I cared, but this page doesn't mention it. If I was supposed to have learned is one of the two meanings used in the article, the word statistics should probably be mentioned (with a link), otherwise the statistical meaning is necessary. Tuf-Kat

Thanks Tuf-Kat

I'm not going to mess with that half of it. :-) EasilyAmused

My Stats teacher right now is having a terrible time explaining degrees of freedom, and I can't figure it out... this page is no help. Hopefully when I figure it out I can provide a better explanation. -Booya

The definition provided needs to be fixed. The common usage is applicable both to the engineering/statics and physics applications, which is that the number of degrees of freedom is the dimension of the system's configuration space, not the dimension of its phase space. More generally, it's the number of independent ways a system may vary, move or change (which, therefore, also subsumes the applications in statistics). A single atom has 3 degrees of freedom, not 6, while two atoms rigidly joined together collectively has 5. - Mark, 2006 August 22

According to Internic, degrees-freedom.com was only registered 5 days ago (2nd of Febuary 2007) Looks like marketing to me. Kaenneth 10:00, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] numerics vs statistics?

Not sure if there is a difference between degrees of freedom (statistics) and degrees of freedom (numerics). Thoughts? --71.35.12.210 (talk) 05:39, 17 February 2008 (UTC)