> Subject:      Re: galton quincunx
 
Marvelous word, "quincunx".  Those of you who have been putting
off a trip to the dictionary to look it up should delay no longer.
 
> The Boston Children's Museum had (years ago) a device that dropped
> the balls and resulted in the bell shaped curve.  Try them.
 
So did the wonderful Mathematics exhibit in the Museum of Science
and Industry in Los Angeles.  That gallery was one of my favorite
museum spaces when I was a somewhat nerdy child in the L.A. basin.
It is still there, I wonder?
 
That gallery, and an enormous geode in the L. A. County natural history
museum, and the delightfully "mad-scientist" exhibits in the Griffith
Park planetarium, are probably why I have worked in museums all my
professional life.  We make magic, folks.  And we make some of our
best magic with low-tech things like ball bearings showering through
a quincunctial arrangement of steel pegs to form a normal distribution,
an object creating its own sense of wonder and infinite possibilities.
 
       +------------------------------+------------------------+
       |  Barbara Weitbrecht          |  [log in to unmask]  |
       |  National Air & Space Museum |  [log in to unmask]       |
       |  Smithsonian Institution     |  (202) 357-4162        |
       +------------------------------+------------------------+