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Re:The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere by bux93 on Thursday March 19, 2026 @10:46AM (#47440441)
The article doesn't share the actual math, but also not the relatively easy intuition. When you roll a pair of dice, there are more combinations that add up to 7 than any other number. Change the numbers on the dice (change the 1 to a 6, e.g.), there's again more combinations that add up to some numbers than to others. The histogram of the number of combinations that add up to different results is a bell curve. That's why it pops up everywhere you have addition of independent events. It's sad that even introductory statistics courses skip this simple intuition.
Re:The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere by cortesoft on Thursday March 19, 2026 @12:19PM (#47441889)
Anybody who has ever played Craps will know this.
Re:The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere by srean on Thursday March 19, 2026 @11:39AM (#47441297)
And if you take the log of the number of ways you get the entropy corresponding to the 'ways' macrostate.
Re:The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere by trymas on Thursday March 19, 2026 @11:08AM (#47440790)
> It's sad that even introductory statistics courses skip this simple intuition.

I was probably lucky.

We got homework as one of the first lessons in statistics course, for exactly this case.

Roll pair of dice, save the result, do it 200 (or some other bigger number) times, plot the histogram, do some maths, maybe provide any conclusions, etc.

Such things then definitely stuck with you for a long time.

Re:The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere by AlexCornila on Thursday March 19, 2026 @10:55AM (#47440571)
Yeah that is definitely not the relatively easy intuition for this. The relatively easy intuition comes from learning about the Bernoulli trials, binomial distribution and Pascal triangle. Once you understand those you understand why normal distribution is so prevalent. Or just watch this https://youtu.be/AwEaHCjgeXk?si=tV72uauquCHvzkNE
Re:The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere by estearum on Thursday March 19, 2026 @11:36AM (#47441254)
They explained the intuition in like two sentences that an 8th grader can understand and test themselves.

Sounds simpler than whatever you’re talking about here

Re:The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere by streptomycin on Thursday March 19, 2026 @02:28PM (#47443748)
The distribution of the sum of two dice is actually triangular, not a bell curve https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1204492
Re:The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere by mr_toad on Thursday March 19, 2026 @08:51PM (#47448811)
The distribution of the sum of a finite number of dice only approximates a bell curve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irwin%E2%80%93Hall_distributio...