The normal distribution was first introduced by Abaham de Moivre in an article in 1733, which was reprinted in the second edition of his , 1738 in the context of approximating certain distribusi Binomial for large n. His result was extended by Laplace in his book Analytical Theory of Probabilities (1812), and is now called the Theorem de Moivre-
The name "bell curve" goes back to Esprit Jouffret who first used the term "bell surface" in 1872 for a bivariate normal with independent components. The name "normal distribution" was coined independently by Charles S. Peirce, Francis Galton and Wilhelm Lexis around 1875. Despite this terminology, other probability distributions may be more appropriate in some contexts; see the discussion of occurrence below.