Minggu, 30 November 2008

Theorem de Moivre-Laplace

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- Laplace.

Laplace used the normal distribution in the analysis of errors of experiments. The important method of least squares as introduced by Legendre in 1805. Gauss, who claimed to have used the method since 1794, justified it rigorously in 1809 by assuming a normal distribution of the errors. The fact the distribution is sometimes called Gaussian is an example of Stigler's Law.

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.