Counting the story

Combinatorics is one of my favourite topics in discrete maths – that topic which is all about counting the number of ways there are to choose, arrange, allocate or combine things. I like the idea that I could theoretically find out the answer by writing down all the possibilities systematically and literally counting them, but that I can also come up with a quick calculation that produces the same answer by just applying some creative thought. It's this creativity in particular that appeals to me, so much so that I don't call it combinatorics, but "creative counting".

You can read the rest of this blog post, and the followup one, in PDF form here.

The titles of the two blog posts in the series are

• Counting the story
• A story instead of stars and bars