Difference between revisions of "Ball-and-urn"

m
Line 13: Line 13:
  
 
[[Category:Combinatorics]][[Category:Geometry]]
 
[[Category:Combinatorics]][[Category:Geometry]]
 +
 +
[[latex]]

Revision as of 22:06, 19 June 2013

The ball-and-urn technique, also known as stars-and-bars, is a commonly used technique in combinatorics.

It is used to solve problems of the form: how many ways can one distribute $k$ indistinguishable objects into $n$ bins? We can imagine this as finding the number of ways to drop $k$ balls into $n$ urns, or equivalently to drop $k$ balls amongst $n-1$ dividers. The number of ways to do such is ${n+k-1 \choose k}$.

Problems

Template:WikifyThis article is a stub. Help us out by expanding it.

latex