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Discussion

Over coffee, Bob said that he really liked this chapter. This material was full of cases of very concrete procedures for doing useful things. I like that.

Discussion

Over coffee, Bob said that he really liked this chapter. This material was full of cases of very concrete procedures for doing useful things. I like that. Yolanda offered a somewhat different perspective On the other hand, this last procedure only seems to work with interval orders and we still don't have a clue as to how to find the width of a poset in the general case. This might be very difficultlike the graph coloring problems discussed in the last chapter. Dave weighed in with Somehow I think there's going to be a fairly efficient process that works for all posets. We may not have all the tools yet, but let's wait a bit.

Not much was said for a while and after a pause, Carlos ventured that there were probably a lot of combinatorial problems for posets that had analogous versions for graphs and in those cases, the poset version would be a bit more complicated, sometime a little bit and sometimes a very big bit. Zori was quiet but she was thinking. These poset structures might even be useful, as she could imagine many settings in which a linear order was impossible or impractical. Maybe there were ways here to earn a few dollars.

Symbols used here

n!
factorial
n × (n−1) × … × 1; the number of orderings of n things. 0! = 1.
\binom{n}{k}
binomial coefficient, "n choose k"
Number of k-element subsets of n things: n!/(k!(n−k)!).
\sum_{k=1}^{n} a_k
summation
Add a_k for k = 1 up to n.
\prod_{k=1}^{n} a_k
product
Multiply a_k for k = 1 up to n.
\emptyset,\ |A|
empty set, cardinality
The set with no elements; the number of elements of A.

Questions people ask

Permutation or combination?

Ask whether order matters. A lock code is a permutation (order matters); a hand of cards is a combination (it does not).

What is a graph in this sense?

Dots (vertices) joined by lines (edges) — not a plot. Road maps, social networks and molecules are graphs; questions like "is there a route" and "how few colours" are graph theory.

Kokeile omaasi

Parts of this page are adapted from Keller & Trotter, Applied Combinatorics (CC BY-SA 4.0). Condensed and re-explained here; errors are ours.

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