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What does closed form in following sentence mean and why we need tables of c.d.f.?

Normal distributions's p.d.f. cannot be integrated in closed form, and hence tables of the c.d.f. or computer programs are necessary in order to compute probabilities and quantiles for normal distributions.

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    Who still uses tables these days? O_o Most of the computing environments I know can easily evaluate the CDF of the normal distribution (as well as the inverse), and even if they weren't implemented, the algorithms for numerically evaluating them are not too complicated.2012-07-08
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    [A related question...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/138664)2012-07-08
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    [Another related question.](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/9199)2012-07-08

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