Poincaré once received a letter from the French physicist Gabriel Lippmann, who brilliantly summed up why the normal distribution was so widely exalted: “Everybody believes in the [bell curve]: the experimenters, because they think it can be proved by mathematics; and the mathematicians, because they believe it has been established by observation.” In science as in so many other spheres, we often choose to see what serves our own interests.

— Here's looking at Euclid by Alex Bellos