Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

Digging into the Frank Archives, this one was from a class on probability, random processes, simulation, and modeling that I took in the Spring of 1992. It was taught by my advisor. On occasion, he would use a slightly wrong form of a word, like "head" or "tail" for "heads" or "tails." Aside: my writing was really poor compared to his; he helped me immensely. Anyway, he said something like this one day and it amused me. I should note that the "Hmmmmm...hmmmm????" was one of his characteristic speech patterns (I want to say a proper-name-ism, but I really try to avoid using proper names of people in the text portion here, to limit Google pointing to it and causing embarassment or worse). Looking closer, I realize that I have "N choose K times X times E to the lambda T" and the graph above it is a stair-step probability function. Below the speech baloon is an integral from negative infinity to ... something. Unfortunately, this sketch was in pencil and after 16 years things tend to fade. I included a larger version of this image here. Again, this probably looks better on an all-white background, just click on the image for that.