This is another example of one distribution limiting another one, in this case, the normal distribution is the limiting distribution of the Student's t when the degrees of freedom in the Student's t a...This is another example of one distribution limiting another one, in this case, the normal distribution is the limiting distribution of the Student's t when the degrees of freedom in the Student's t approaches infinity. The Greek letter ν (pronounced nu) is placed in the general formula in recognition that there are many Student tν distributions, one for each sample size. ν is the symbol for the degrees of freedom of the distribution and depends on the size of the sample.