At the end of part one, aspiring statisticians Woodrow “Woody” Stem and August “Russell” Leaf, creators of the famed Stem-and-Leaf plot, were in bad shape. They had beaten each other statsless after an argument about the challenge given to them by their mentor, Dr. Histeaux Graham. That challenge: to devise a simple yet elegant way to examine the distribution of values in a sample.

After their fateful bout of pugilism, Woody convalesced at the renowned Saint Tukey Center for Post Hoc Health. There, he continued to refine his theory of equally spaced intervals (or “bins,” as he did eventually resort to calling them). His approach was great for evaluating the range of the sample—the proverbial minimum and maximum. But alas! How could he examine the values betwixt these values? The problem vexed him greatly.

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