>> Uhhhhh y’all got the Reader’s Digest layman’s version of all them purty pictures and funny squiggles on the page?
Normal distribution = Bell curve. It’s the graph that looks like a hill. (look it up)
This shows how many things are randomly distributed For example, the heights of men. There are very, very few at the low end and at the high end. The peak is in the middle (average - or mean - height of a man). The further you go away from the middle the lower the hill. I.e., the fewer men there are of that height.
erf function
It is the integral of the normal distribution.
The normal distribution (Bell curve) has a total area under it of 1.0. So as you move from left to right and add on more and more bits of it, you eventually accumulate the entire 1.0 area. erf tells you how much of that you have accumulated as you go along.
This would be so much easier to explain if I could wave my hands and draw pictures!
Have actually understood the bell curve and basic t-test type statistics for more than 40 years. But the other elaborations is beyond me. And, actually, beyond what I want to learn—unless someone can inject it while I sleep. LOL. Thanks anyway. Was just being flip.