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But where does the Normal Distribution come from?

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Tags: probabilitystatisticsnormal-distributionbell-curve

The Normal Distribution is perhaps the most important distribution in probability. Everybody learns about it in high-school, but its exact form is usually dropped down from on-high and it isn't explained how anyone came up with it. I thought that the best way to scratch this itch was to find out where it came from historically, which this entry covers by showing how the normal distribution originated with the work of De Moivre (though he didn't yet know that his discovery would be important in probability).

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5.71 Overall score*

89 Rank

9 Votes

5 Comments

Comments

5.2

Solid video, nothing too much to really say about it. I appreciate the historical context as that’s something that tends to be ignored in a lot of these math explainers. The blue background color I think was a bit too bright and not the best choice, though.

6.6

It’s always nice to see how concepts were developed historically.

4.5

A lot of dry algebra and not much interesting insights that help elucidate the ideas.

Nicely done but this is not something new

5.7

This is the standard explanation of the formula. It is well narrated and clear to follow each algebraic step if you already know the laws of algebra. However there are a lot of steps in the proof and it would be good if it was broken up in to some kind of milestones.
It would definitely be good to link the algebra somehow to the Normal distribution graph. visually at the end. I’m not sure how but is there is a way to plot the tangent at each point or something? So we really see what the equation means in the graph. This is a good explainer video but I don’t feel it really added to the topic.