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What is the symbol for the normal density function in LaTeX?

  • Can you link to a picture of the symbol you're looking for? It's not clear from the question what it is you want... – Seamus Dec 12 '10 at 16:43
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    When I went to look it up I realised that it is \mathcal{N}. Sorry. –  Dec 12 '10 at 16:46
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    @asdf123: It would be nice if you just note the solution you found below as an answer and mark it as "accepted". This way everybody can see that the question is answered resp. closed and not open any more. – Stefan Kottwitz Dec 12 '10 at 16:58
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    For such things it's always worth to take a look at »Wikipedia«. – Thorsten Donig Dec 12 '10 at 17:30
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    @asdfl123 @Thorsten ... and if you look under the edit tag in the Wikipedia you will see the actual LaTeX command! – yannisl Dec 12 '10 at 20:06
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    FWIW, LaTeX doesn't attach any particular meaning to symbols, so asking what symbol is used for a particular function is not a question about LaTeX, it's a question about math. Only once you know what the symbol looks like does it become a LaTeX question ("how do I create this glyph in LaTeX"). – David Z Dec 13 '10 at 17:00
  • @DavidZ This might not be the intended use of this SE but FWIW I find it incredibly useful to search this site for a math symbol I want to know the meaning of, I got here by googling "curly N in equation latex" and thanks to this page I found out that represented a normal distribution. If I take the "latex" out of the search the results are pretty much useless. – jrh Feb 20 '19 at 13:47

5 Answers5

149

asdf123 wrote:

...I realised that it is \mathcal{N}.
Charles Stewart
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53

From Wikipedia:

X ~ N(mu, sigma^2)

where code for the displayed equation is:

\[
  X \sim \mathcal{N}(\mu,\,\sigma^{2})\,.
\]
Mateen Ulhaq
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Zarko
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3
X \hookrightarrow  \mathcal{N}(\mu,\,\sigma^{2})

this one is better I think :p

Mensch
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Farah
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3

In this website or on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution) there are a large common of list of probability and statistics-symbols:

enter image description here

For Wikipedia click in edit and you can see the used code.

Sebastiano
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  • At this time, February 2022, the wikipedia page you link to appears to use \mathcal{N}, which looks different from the upright font you used in your table. – PatrickT Feb 15 '22 at 05:43
  • @PatrickT I have seen again the page of my link but I not see the \mathcal{N}. Where you have seen this apparence? I see the classic $N$. Bye. – Sebastiano Feb 15 '22 at 19:49
  • Here's what I see on wikipedia as of Feb 16, 2022 (copy-pasted from the source code under "Notation"): https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/863304aaa42a945f2f07d79facc3d2eebc845ce7 It's \mathcal. That's what I mean by my comment above. – PatrickT Feb 16 '22 at 08:17
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    And by the way, I prefer upright, I'm not a big fan of \mathcal! – PatrickT Feb 16 '22 at 08:17
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    @PatrickT Ah but it not is wikipedia but in wikimedia :-). I prefer $N$ and not \mathcal. – Sebastiano Feb 16 '22 at 21:11
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    wikimedia is where wikipedia stores things like images. The \mathcal comes from the wikipedia page you cite, it's in several places, including where it has the Notation in the column on the rhs. – PatrickT Feb 17 '22 at 03:15
1

The above answer did not work for me. For that I used dollar sign before and after that and it did work like this;

\STATEx $\mathcal{N}$(\mu, $\sigma^2 $))$

This worked for me. I hope it may help others as well.

Sumair Saeed Khurshid
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    Welcome to the TeX.SE. Surely we can give you an answer: but this answer must be possibly where needed followed by a small compilable latex code where we can see your work. Please can you post a MinimalWorkingExample? What is \STATEx? How your code work? – Sebastiano Jun 11 '21 at 14:22