Portal:Mathematics/Featured picture/2008 04

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Picture of the month

Credit: Alessio Damato & Mikhail Ryazanov

The normal distribution, also called the Laplace-Gaussian distribution, is an important family of continuous probability distributions, applicable in many fields. The importance of the normal distribution as a model of quantitative phenomena in the natural and behavioral sciences is due to the central limit theorem. Many psychological measurements and physical phenomena (like noise) can be approximated well by the normal distribution. An example frequently given is the intelligence quotient (IQ), seen above. Note that this graph has been artificially generated and is not based on any real measurements.

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