Combining Many Factors: The Gaussian Distribution

(a) A common distribution in diverse circumstances; (b) Physical origin of Gaussian distributions; (c) The Gaussian as the limiting form of the binomial; (d) Properties of the Gaussian; (e) How random variables combine; (f) The Gaussian form as a fixed point for convolutions; (g) Multi-variate Gaussians; (h) Gaussians in disguise: particle velocities and stellar masses; (i) Error distributions.