Tuesday, September 05, 2006

How to count stuff

A new primer on combinatorics that I wrote can be found here. I first cover basic stuff like permutations and combinations. The rest focuses on a more complicated counting problem, which leads to a derivation of the multinomial coefficient. The multinomial coefficient is used in a lot of fields. For instance, it comes up in the derivation of the Boltzmann Distribution in statistical mechanics.

As usual, comments on the document are welcome.