What do you see in the image to the right?

If you said flowers, you're only partially right.

What if I told you it was hair? Would you believe me?

Step back from your computer and look again.

The image above is actually part of a mosaic of a young woman. Click here to see the full image.

When you look at data in bigger chunks (like the thick purple histogram below) you're missing part of the bigger picture. When you zoom out, or divide things into smaller pieces, the real picture becomes much more clear. In math, smoothing out the curves help you see the picture more clearly just like in a mosaic picture.

Imagine a survey or experiment with a few trials. The histogram bars would be pretty wide. Perform a few more trials and the bars get narrower.

Three histograms. All are left skewed. The curve gets smoother and smoother as the bars get narrower and narrower.

A few more trials again, and the edges become smoother and smoother until there are so many bars, so close together, that the tops of the bars form a smooth curve. Earlier in this unit we used histograms to combine data into clusters (like the purple ones above). However, as we continue through the course, more often we will not combine the data into clusters and the result will be data that gives us a smooth, continuous curve.

As we move on in this lesson, making the connection between the histograms (left and center images) and the curve (rightmost image) will be important to keep in mind. Think of mosaic images like the young woman at the top of this page!

Images adapted from Pixabay user Allexsalon at https://pixabay.com/en/portrait-mosaic-girl-flowers-1376045/