High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In probability theory and statistics, the Gumbel distribution (named after Emil Julius Gumbel (1891 1966)) is used to model the distribution of the maximum (or the minimum) of a number of samples of various distributions. For example we would use it to represent the distribution of the maximum level of a river in a particular year if we had the list of maximum values for the past ten years. It is useful in predicting the chance that an extreme earthquake, flood or other natural disaster will occur.