The zero-th moment \langle 1\rangle is just the normalization condition of p . The first moment, \langle x\rangle , is called the mean of p and often denoted by the letter \mu \begin{equation*} \langle x\rangle = \mu \equiv \int x p(x)dx, \end{equation*} for a continuous distribution and \begin{equation*} \langle x\rangle = \mu \equiv \sum_{i=1}^N x_i p(x_i), \end{equation*} for a discrete distribution. Qualitatively it represents the centroid or the average value of the PDF and is therefore simply called the expectation value of p(x) .