| Online Tools » Mathematics » Max, min, range | en sv |
The tool quickly lets you extract the largest and smallest values, and see how much they differ.
The largest value in a data set is often called the maximum (or max for short), and the smallest value is called the minimum (or min). The difference between the maximum and minimum value is sometimes called the range and is calculated by subtracting the smallest value from the largest value.
It is not difficult to calculate the range by hand but first the maximum and minimum values has to be known. If nothing is known about the values in a data set there is no faster way than to go through each value, one by one, to see which value is the largest and which is the smallest. It becomes much easier if the values are sorted, from smallest to largest, because then it is enough to just look at the first and last values to find the minimum and maximum values.
It is seldom worth the effort to sort an unordered list of numbers only to find the maximum and minimum values because sorting is a more complicated procedure than just stepping though each value. However, if other statistical measures, such median and quartiles, are to be calculated at the same time it can sometimes be motivated to sort the list.