The Normal Distribution and the Central Limit Theorem

When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that we can draw conclusions about huge populations, even the whole world, based on datasets that are comparatively very small (a few thousand, or a few hundred, or even sometimes a few dozen). That’s the power of statistics, though. This episode is kind of a two-for-one but we’re excited about it—first we’ll talk about the Normal or Gaussian distribution, which is maybe the most famous probability distribution function out there, and then turn to the Central Limit Theorem, which is one of the foundational tenets of statistics and the real reason why the Normal distribution is so important.