Central limit theorem

Central limit theorems are a set of weak-convergence results in probability theory. Intuitively, they all express the fact that any sum of many independent identically distributed random variables will tend to be distributed according to a particular "attractor distribution". The most important and famous result is simply called The Central Limit Theorem which states that if the summed variables have a finite variance then they will be approximately normally distributed. Since many real processes yield distributions with finite variance, this explains the ubiquity of the normal distribution.

External links

• Animated examples of the CLT
• Central Limit Theorem Java
• Central Limit Theorem interactive simulation to experiment with various parameters