Portal:Mathematics/Featured picture/2012 11
Picture of the month
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Credit: Fangz (original uploader)
Francis Galton's original 1889 drawing of a "bean machine", now commonly called a "Galton box", which demonstrates the central limit theorem of probability, in particular the form of it that states that the normal distribution is a good approximation to the binomial distribution. As the "bean" falls through the machine, it can fall to the left or right of each pin it approaches. This makes the final position of the bean the sum of several Bernoulli random variables, each approximately independent of the others. A level box, as pictured, gives a probability of 0.5 to fall either way at each pin, but a tilted box results in asymmetric probabilities, and thus a skewed distribution (see a photograph of a real-world example).
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