I will make some illustrations with R. First, using results discussed at https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/45124/central-limit-theorem-for-sample-medians the asymptotic distribution of sample median of $N$ iid observations from a normal distribution is itself a normal distribution centered at the theoretical median $\mu$ and with variance $\frac{2\pi \sigma^2}{4 N}$ where $\sigma^2$ is the variance of the parent distribution. The sample median is the central order statistic, and in the case $N=2s+1$ is odd, it is the order statistic of order $s+1$, which have a distribution we can calculate exactly rather easily (theory given in the cited post and elsewhere at this site). I will use some R function I detail at the end of this post to compare the exact and approximate distributions of the sample median. We use the standard normal for parent distribution. First with sample size $N=11$: [![enter image description here][1]][1] The approximation is already quite good! Let us look at the case $N=101$: [![enter image description here][2]][2] Here the approximation is virtually exact. Some R functions for distributions of order statistics: ```r porder <- function(x, N=1, r=1, basename="norm", ..., log.p=FALSE) { pfun <- get(paste("p", basename, sep="")) stopifnot(r <= N) prob <- pfun(x, ...) retval <- pbeta(prob, r, N-r+1, log.p=log.p) retval } dorder <- function(x, N=1, r=1, basename="norm", ..., log=FALSE) { pfun <- get(paste("p", basename, sep="")) dfun <- get(paste("d", basename, sep="")) stopifnot(r <= N) logdens <- -lbeta(r, N-r+1) + (r-1)*pfun(x, ..., log.p=TRUE) + (N-r)*pfun(x, ..., lower.tail=FALSE, log.p=TRUE) + dfun(x, ..., log=TRUE) retval <- if (log) logdens else exp(logdens) retval } qorder <- function(p, N=1, r=1, basename="norm", ..., log.p=FALSE) { pfun <- get(paste("p", basename, sep="")) qfun <- get(paste("q", basename, sep="")) stopifnot( r <= N) retval <- qfun(qbeta( p, r, N-r+1, log.p=log.p), ..., log.p=FALSE) retval } rorder <- function(n, N=1, r=1, basename="norm", ...) { qfun <- get(paste("q", basename, sep="")) qfun( rbeta(n, r, N-r+1), ... ) } ``` [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/fRkTj.png [2]: https://i.sstatic.net/atQAy.png