In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Dennis Roberts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>addendum
>if one manipulates n and p in a binomial and, gets to a point where a
>person would say (or we would say as the instructor) that what you see is
>very similar to ... and might even be approximated well by ... the nd
>... this MEANS that the nd came first in the sense that one would have to
>be familiar with that before you could draw the parallel
This is hardly the case, as the normal distribution seems
to have been unknown before De Moivre came up with the
approximation. What one does have to know is that a sum
can be approximated by an integral; this reverse of this
relation between sums and integrals, which is the way that
integration should be taught, was known to those with
enough mathematical education to be able to understand
integration long before differential calculus was
discovered.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
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