Bell Curve

Bell curve may refer to:

  • A Gaussian function, a specific kind of function whose graph is a bell-shaped curve
  • Normal (Gaussian) distribution, whose density function is a Gaussian function
  • The Bell Curve, a 1994 book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray
  • Bell curve grading, a method of evaluating scholastic performance

Famous quotes containing the words bell and/or curve:

    I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
    Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

    I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty.... Here was every sensuous curve of the “human figure divine” but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.
    Edward Weston (1886–1958)