It's a lower-case Greek sigma followed by a superscript 2, in other words, "sigma-squared".
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In statistics, this is the symbol for the "Variance"
yes, it can be smaller, equal or larger to the true value of the population varience.
It is a biased estimator. S.R.S leads to a biased sample variance but i.i.d random sampling leads to a unbiased sample variance.
No. Well not exactly. The square of the standard deviation of a sample, when squared (s2) is an unbiased estimate of the variance of the population. I would not call it crude, but just an estimate. An estimate is an approximate value of the parameter of the population you would like to know (estimand) which in this case is the variance.
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