

Standard deviation is important because it measures the dispersion of data – or, in practical terms, volatility. Step 6: To find the sample standard deviation, calculate the square root of the variance: Step 5: The sample variance can now be calculated:

Step 1: The average depth of this river, x-bar, is found to be 4’.

#2 SIGMA NORMAL DISTRIBUTION PLUS#
The area between plus and minus one standard deviation from the mean contains 68% of the data. The assumption we can make about the data that follows a normal curve is that the area under the curve is relative to how many standard deviations we are away from the mean. The mean of a normal curve is the middle of the curve (or the peak of the bell) with equal amount of data on both sides, while the standard deviation quantifies the variability of the curve (in other words, how wide or narrow the curve is). It allows you to make assumptions about the data. This is important because data distributed in this way exhibits specific characteristics, namely as it relates to the mean and standard deviation. The distribution of weight (in Kg) of a certain population of male students is found to follow a Gaussian with a population mean of 57.6 Kg and a standard deviation of 5.2 Kg.To understand standard deviation, you must first know what a normal curve, or bell curve, looks like. Quetelet(1796-1894), the inventor of Body Mass Index, was the first mathematician to apply normal distribution to describe human physical characteristics like hight, weight etc. The normal distrbution was also names as the "Gaussian distribution". In 1809, Carl Friedrich Gauss, the great German mathematician, developed the formula for the normal distribution from basic assumptions and used it to fit astronomical data. It is an easy way of estimating cumulative probabilities for binomial distribution. This integral could be evaluated by numerical methods and tabulated. The normal (Gaussian) density distribution of a variable with population mean \(\small $$ A brief history of this distribution is given a later section of this article. It is widely known as "Normal distribution". This distribution was named "Gaussian distribution". Prominant among them was Gauss, who derived the theoretical probability distribution for this bell shaped curve. During 18th and 19th centuries, many mathematicians in Europe provided the mathematical formula for this bell shaped probability density distribution. This bell shaped distribution is universally exhibited by the repeated measurements of many quantities in nature. Thus, in the case of height, the curve peaks at the mean height of 172.7 cm and the histogram of weight peaks at its mean value of 57.6 Kg. We also notice that the histograms approximately peak at their mean values. The above two distributions are in the form of a "bell shaped curve". Freqeucy distribution of height and weight of 25000 humans
