Statistics... of the *Spatial* Variety

I know the sentiment probably isn't popular amongst my classmates, but I have always rather enjoyed statistics.  The idea of describing and predicting phenomena, be it natural or man-made, with math is fascinating to me.  Spatial statistics are an especially important facet of geographic science and GIS; describing the "why of the where," as a professor I once had put it, is one of the discipline's prime directives, and cannot be done without statistical analysis.  

The above is a map, created in ArcGIS Desktop, of weather monitoring stations in Western Europe.  This map of points presents a convenient set of data with which to perform some basic spatial analysis of central tendency- such as the calculation of the mean and median centers of station distribution.  The green shaded oval shows the general trend of distribution, using the number of stations within one standard deviation of the mean.  These analyses were relatively simple to perform with GIS, and undoubtedly represent only a small fraction of what the program can do with statistics.  My exposure to these capabilities, up to this point, has been nonexistent, and I greatly look forward to exploring them as I progress in this program.