History of Normal Distribution
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Sarthak Goel.
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Sarthak Goel
How normal distribution was invented?
We all know what is normal distribution and how important it is in the world of statistics. But, have you ever wondered about the invention of this widely used distribution and where it arises from?
The credit of the discovery of normal distribution goes to De Moivre, a great statistician and consultant to gamblers.
Bernoulli trial, the trial with a success or a failure gave rise to binomial distribution (which is basically the sum of all the Bernoulli trials with the same parameters) with i successes and j failures in n trials.
This binomial distribution is widely used to calculate the probability of success in the toss of a fair coin. Here, success could either be getting a tail or a head with P(success)= 0.5.
It was observed that when the number of trials increased, the binomial distribution takes a very smooth bell shape curve, now known as the shape of normal distribution.
On this realization, he was keen to get a mathematical expression for this curve so that large calculations when the number of trials is large could be done easily.
The first application of normal distribution was done for the analysis of measurement errors that occurred due to imperfect conditions.
Adolphe Quetelet was the first person who applied normal distribution in real life apart from the analysis of errors. He used this distribution to know the chest size of Scottish soldiers and was successful in the implication of normal distribution.
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