These notes discuss, in a style intended for physicists, how to average data and fit it to some functional form. I try to make clear what is being calculated, what assumptions are being made, and to give a derivation of results rather than just quote them. The aim is put a lot useful pedagogical material together in a convenient place. This manuscript is a substantial enlargement of lecture notes I prepared for the Bad Honnef School on Efficient Algorithms in Computational Physics, September 10-14, 2012.
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