I was thinking of the Cauchy distribution, with undefined variance. But Augustin-Louis Cauchy had quite a few things named after him. I know best Cauchy sequences as a construction of Real numbers.

On Sun, Aug 29, 2021, 2:36 AM Stephen J. Turnbull < stephenjturnbull@gmail.com> wrote:

David Mertz, Ph.D. writes:

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I have a distribution for you: Cauchy. :-)

Oh? Because NaN is the *result* of `stats.variance(cauchy)`?

It still seems like as INPUTS to a stats function NaN ~= missing.

Well, that was a little opaque. I wanted to fit it into the "I have a ... for you" pattern.

What I meant by "Cauchy" was just a ratio whose denominator's support includes zero. It's occasionally seen in (not so hot) dynamic economic trade models (designed on the assumption of positive growth rates oops :-�)P). I don't know about other contexts.

Steve