What Is Gaussian Distribution?
In statistics, the Gaussian, or normal, distribution is used to characterize complex systems with many factors. As described in Stephen Stigler’s The History of Statistics, Abraham De Moivre invented the distribution that bears Karl Fredrick Gauss’s name. Gauss’s contribution lay in his application of the distribution to the least squares approach to minimizing error in fitting data with a line of best fit. He thus made it the most important error distribution in statistics.
