* Astronomy

 Why is the bell curve so ubiquitous?

Known to statisticians as the Gaussian or Normal distribution, the bell curve is routinely used to describe everything from the outcome of dice rolls to the weights, heights and IQs of randomly selected groups of people.
Read more

The "Gaussian distribution" was named after Carl Friedrich Gauss, who introduced the distribution in 1809 as a way of rationalising the method of least squares as outlined above. The related work of Laplace, also outlined above has led to the normal distribution being sometimes called Laplacian, especially in French-speaking countries. Among English speakers, both "normal distribution" and "Gaussian distribution" are in common use, with different terms preferred by different communities.
Read more