March 17, 2018 at 05:40AM

Today I learned: 1) The PDF for the Gaussian distribution was discovered something like 80 years before Guass by de Moivre, who wrote it out as part of his treatise on probability "The Doctrine of Chances" (which was apparently written primarily for gamblers?). From what I gather, de Moivre's paper on the normal distribution (which he used as an approximation of a binomial distribution for large numbers of trials(!)) languished in obscurity until well after Gauss formalized the distribution and popularized it. 2) Related: Stigler's Law of Eponymy states that any scientific or mathematical discovery named after a person was not discovered by the person it was named after. This includes Stigler's Law (attributed by Stigler to one Robert K. Merton). 3) On a more sober note, today I learned that lynchings in the US were much, much worse than I thought. I *thought* lynchings were basically public killings with a big crowd. In fact, lynchings were more akin to medieval executions -- that is, the murder part would be preceeded by hours of torture involving things like open flames and removal of body parts.