[theoh]

Yes. If you spend your whole life on one long multi-transfer bus journey, you'll end up with a gaussian.

It's a bit less clear that gaussians should be used when e.g. fitting a coordinate to an astronomical feature, which might not actually be symmetrical.

The other useful property that the gaussian has is its separability, in the 2D case. That is unique to the gaussian and counts for a lot.

[LolWolf]

Eh, I don’t think that many are required. Convergence to a Gaussian is pretty fast (you should check out page 299 of [0]), at four or five a Gaussian is already a quite good approximations.

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[0] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articl...