Stan

Stan is a masculine given name commonly used as a shortened form of Stanley in English-speaking contexts and of Slavic given names such as Stanisław and Stanislav. In informal use, Stan may stand as a standalone given name. The name has been borne by various public figures across fields such as entertainment, sports, and academia, including Stan Lee, the American comic book writer and publisher, who popularized the form in modern popular culture.

Stan is also the name of a probabilistic programming language used for statistical modeling and Bayesian inference. Open-source and implemented in C++, Stan provides a high-level language for describing probabilistic models and relies on advanced MCMC algorithms, notably Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, to sample from posterior distributions. It offers interfaces to several programming environments, including R (via rstan), Python (via pystan or cmdstanpy), and others, facilitating scalable inference for complex models.

As a slang term, stan denotes an extremely devoted or obsessive fan of a person or thing. Originating from Eminem's 2000 song "Stan," the term has spread across online communities and social media. It can be used as a noun or verb (to stan someone) and has given rise to the broader "stan culture" vocabulary, which ranges from enthusiastic appreciation to unsolicited advocacy and fan-driven discussion.