Abstract
Binomial coefficients are among the most important whole numbers you will ever know. Most middle-school students have seen Pascal’s triangle, and we will see that this triangle of numbers is one of the most flexible and durable objects in mathematics.
“Mathematics is not a deductive science—that’s a cliche. When you try to prove a theorem, you don’t just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.”
–Paul Halmos
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Petersen, T.K. (2019). Combinations. In: Inquiry-Based Enumerative Combinatorics. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18308-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18308-0_3
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