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In combinatorics, the twelvefold way is a systematic classification of 12 related enumerative problems concerning two finite sets, which include the classical problems of counting permutations, combinations, multisets, and partitions either of a set or of a number.
Two examples of this type of problem are counting combinations and counting permutations. More generally, given an infinite collection of finite sets S i indexed by the natural numbers , enumerative combinatorics seeks to describe a counting function which counts the number of objects in S n for each n .
Enumerative combinatorics is the most classical area of combinatorics and concentrates on counting the number of certain combinatorial objects. Although counting the number of elements in a set is a rather broad mathematical problem, many of the problems that arise in applications have a relatively simple combinatorial description.
In the given example, there are 12 = 2(3!) permutations with property P 1, 6 = 3! permutations with property P 2 and no permutations have properties P 3 or P 4 as there are no restrictions for these two elements. The number of permutations satisfying the restrictions is thus: 4! − (12 + 6 + 0 + 0) + (4) = 24 − 18 + 4 = 10.
An archetypal double counting proof is for the well known formula for the number () of k-combinations (i.e., subsets of size k) of an n-element set: = (+) ().Here a direct bijective proof is not possible: because the right-hand side of the identity is a fraction, there is no set obviously counted by it (it even takes some thought to see that the denominator always evenly divides the numerator).
The usual way to prove that there are n! different permutations of n objects is to observe that the first object can be chosen in n different ways, the next object in n − 1 different ways (because choosing the same number as the first is forbidden), the next in n − 2 different ways (because there are now 2 forbidden values), and so forth.
Two combinatorial classes are said to be isomorphic if they have the same numbers of objects of each size, or equivalently, if their counting sequences are the same. [3] Frequently, once two combinatorial classes are known to be isomorphic, a bijective proof of this equivalence is sought; such a proof may be interpreted as showing that the ...
The inclusion–exclusion principle relates the size of the union of multiple sets, the size of each set, and the size of each possible intersection of the sets. The smallest example is when there are two sets: the number of elements in the union of A and B is equal to the sum of the number of elements in A and B , minus the number of elements ...