Re: [office-comment] Re: Gaussian Distribution vs Normal Distribution

[Brad Hards <bradh@frogmouth.net>]

On Wednesday 13 February 2008 08:32:24 pm Leonard Mada wrote:
> > > * A Googlefight (showing which term is more popular on the Internet)
> >
> > shows
> >
> > > "Gaussian distribution" with 943,000 references while "normal
> > > distribution" gets 14,100,100 references:
>
> FALSE
Please don't shout.

> GOOGLE:
> "normal distribution": 782,000
> "gaussian distribution": 573,000
I don't get that either. Without the quotes, I get David Wheeler's result.
With quotes
normal: about 839,000
gaussian: about 557,000

> The difference is quite small, and, considering that one is a technical
> term and the other was quite common to the laymen and in the past, this
> seems even more astonishing.
This is the key issue: which is the expected term for most users? I 
think "normal distribution" is. 

(As for the why: the internet does have a lot of technical papers - most 
normal people don't write about distributions :-)

Also, commonality with previous spreadsheet usage is good. I believe it is 
called NORMDIST() in Excel and Ooo.

Brad