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

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

Leonard Mada:
> > > * 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
> 
> GOOGLE:
> "normal distribution": 782,000
> "gaussian distribution": 573,000
> 
> 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.

Very weird.  When I go to Googlefight it gives me the numbers I quoted:
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Gaussian+distribution&word2=Normal+distribution
Yet going to Google directly gives the numbers you quoted.
I have no idea why there's such a difference in the results, but I'll happily
agree that the numbers you found are more convincing than the Google numbers I found.

I certainly care about using the correct terminology!  The problem in these cases is that I want to find objective evidence that leads to concluding that one or the other is correct.  And while I respect Dr. Feinstein, when I searched for various sources to determine which is the most common term among the experts, that's what I found.  A "majority vote by the experts who use it" isn't perfect, but it's the best position I know of.

In addition, if you want to change the NAME of the functions (not just their description), the problem is that this IS the standard name of the function among _all_ spreadsheet implementations.  We can easily change the text _describing_ the function, and we can easily change the name of a function not often implemented.. but this _is_ a common function, with a commonly-agreed-on name in the spreadsheet world.

Your position is a very reasonable one, but given the incompatibilities with existing spreadsheets that would be caused by changing the function name, I don't see that it's worth it.

--- David A. Wheeler