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- A course consists of 50 lectures given to 20 people, all of whom
get up before 9:00 a.m. and attend all classes.
- A grand total of 1,000 smiles is observed.
- What is the chance that Frank Nagy (a physics graduate student
in times gone by) smiled exactly once during the whole course?
- Solution: Use previous formalism, setting each trial as a
smile: and success as Frank Nagy smiled.
- A priori, each smile has equal probability of belonging to each
person so
, 
, and n=1000.
- Thus:
Geoffrey Fox, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, gcf@npac.syr.edu