History
This distribution is often referred to as Laplace's first law of errors. He published it in 1774 when he noted that the frequency of an error could be expressed as an exponential function of its magnitude once its sign was disregarded.
Laplace in 1778 published his second law of errors wherein he noted that the frequency of an error was proportional to the exponential of the square of its magnitude. This was subsequently rediscovered by Gauss (possibly in 1795) and it is now best known as the Normal distribution.
Keynes published a paper in 1911 based on his earlier thesis wherein he showed that the Laplace distribution minimised the absolute deviation from the median.
Read more about this topic: Laplace Distribution
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