TI-BASIC:Median
Command Summary
Finds the median of a list.
Command Syntax
median(list,[freqlist])
Menu Location
Press:
- 2ND LIST to enter the LIST menu.
- LEFT to enter the MATH submenu.
- 4 to select median(, or use arrows.
TI-83/84/+/SE
1 byte
The median( command finds the median of a list. It takes a list of real numbers as a parameter. For example:
:Prompt L1 :Disp "MEDIAN OF L1",median(L1
That's not all, however. Awesome as the median( command is, it can also take a frequency list argument, for situations when your elements occur more than once. For example:
:Disp median({1,2,3},{5,4,4})
is short for
:median({1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3})
The frequency list {5,4,4} means that the first element, 1, occurs 5 times, the second element, 2, occurs 4 times, and the third element, 3, occurs 4 times.
Advanced Uses
Frequency lists don't need to be whole numbers. Amazing as that may sound, your calculator can handle being told that one element of the list occurs 1/3 of a time, and another occurs 22.7 times. It can even handle a frequency of 0 - it will just ignore that element, as though it weren't there. One caveat, though - if all of the elements occur 0 times, there's nothing to take the median of and your calculator will throw an error.
Error Conditions
- ERR:DATA TYPE is thrown, among other cases, if the data list is complex, or if the frequencies are not all positive and real.
- ERR:DIM MISMATCH is thrown if the frequency list and the data list have a different number of elements.
- ERR:DIVIDE BY 0 is thrown if the frequency list's elements are all 0.
