Everyone is sure of this [that errors are normally distributed], Mr. Lippman told me one day, since the experimentalists believe that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians that it is an experimentally determined fact.

Tout le monde y croit cependant, me disait un jour M. Lippmann, car les expérimentateurs s'imaginent que c'est un théorème de mathématiques, et les mathématiciens que c'est un fait expérimental.

Original text (French)

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Notes from Wikiquote

Calcul des probabilités (2nd ed., 1912), p. 171

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Henri Poincaré (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.