I find turning the math into working code sometimes helps me. The for-loop in my code only approximates the mean within +- 0.5 intervals. This is because it rel

I find turning the math into working code sometimes helps me. The for-loop in my code only approximates the mean within +- 0.5 intervals. This is because it relies on the definition for finding the mean provided in OP's article, rather than your derivation of the arithmetic mean. import numpy as np X = [0,1,2,3,3,3,4,5,6,6,6] mean_dict = {} for i in [x/10 for x in range(0,100)]: mean_dict[sum([abs(x-i)**2 for x in X])] = i print(mean_dict[min(mean_dict)], "score:", min(mean_dict)) #add actual mean to series mean_dict[sum([abs(x-np.mean(X))2 for x in X])] = np.mean(X) print("real mean:", mean_dict[min(mean_dict)], "score:", min(mean_dict))