Combinatorics Through Guided Discovery, 2004a
Combinatorics Through Guided Discovery, 2004a
Combinatorics Through Guided Discovery, 2004a
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37. Ask yourself “What is a problem like this doing in the middle of a bunch of<br />
problems about counting subsets of a set? Is it related, or is it supposed to<br />
gives us a break from sets?”<br />
38. The problem suggests that you think about how to get a list from a seating<br />
arrangement. Could every list of n distinct people come from a seating chart?<br />
How many lists of n distinct people are there? How many lists could we get<br />
from a given seating chart by taking different starting places?<br />
Additional Hint: For a different way of doing the problem, suppose that you<br />
have chosen one person, say the first one in a list of the people in alphabetical<br />
order by name. Now seat that person. Does it matter where they sit? In ways<br />
can you seat the remaining people? Does it matter where the second person<br />
in alphabetical order sits?<br />
39.a. A block consists of all permutations of some subset {a 1 , a 2 ,...,a k } of S. How<br />
many permutations are there of the set {a 1 , a 2 ,...,a k }?<br />
39.c. What sets are listed, and how many times is each one listed if you take one<br />
list from each row of Table 1.2.8? How does this choice of lists give you the<br />
bijection in this special case?<br />
39.d. You can make good use of the product principle here.<br />
40.b. The coach is making a sequence of decisions. Can you figure out how many<br />
choices the coach has for each decision in the sequence?<br />
40.c. As with any counting problem whose context does not suggest an approach,<br />
it is useful to ask yourself if you could decompose the problem into simpler<br />
parts by using either the sum or product principle.<br />
43. How could we get a list of beads from a necklace?<br />
Additional Hint: When we cut the necklace and string it out on a table, there<br />
are 2n lists of beads we could get. Why is it 2n rather than n?<br />
44.a. You might first choose the pairs of people. You might also choose to make a<br />
list of all the people and then take them by twos from the list.<br />
44.b. You might first choose ordered pairs of people, and have the first person in<br />
each pair serve first. You might also choose to make a list of all the people<br />
and then take them by twos from the list in order.<br />
45. It might be helpful to just draw some pictures of the possible configurations.<br />
There aren’t that many.<br />
47. Note that we must walk at least ten blocks, so ten is the smallest number of<br />
blocks possible. In how many of those ten blocks must we walk north?