[OT] "normal" (as in "Guassian")
On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 10:22:41PM +0100, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
Patrick Burns wrote:
Douglas Bates wrote:
On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 8:25 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
On 3/3/2008 9:10 AM, Rogers, James A [PGRD Groton] wrote:
As someone of partly French heritage, I would also ask how this
distribution came to be called "Gaussian". It seems very unfair to de
Moivre, who discovered the distribution at least half a century earlier.
:-)
Just an example of Stigler's Law.
Taking this to a whole new level of "off topic", I wonder if Stigler's
Law is self-referential? That is, should Stigler's Law more correctly
be attributed to someone else?
No. If Stigler's Law were named after some prior person, then it wouldn't be an example of itself.
Only if said person actually was first to discover it, surely.
I believe that Stigler believes that he was not the first to discover Stigler's Law.
Andrew Robinson Department of Mathematics and Statistics Tel: +61-3-8344-6410 University of Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia Fax: +61-3-8344-4599 http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~andrewpr http://blogs.mbs.edu/fishing-in-the-bay/