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Translations in Combinatorics

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2015

Abstract

The article exhibits several problems from a currently developed teaching material on high-school combinatorics. Its philosophy is to enhance combinatorial thinking by giving problems prior to explaining the concepts and introducing the terminology.

The article focuses on searching for an underlying theme between problems with different wordings but the same combinatorial idea. We essentially "translate" one problem to another.

We use translations to show why binomial coefficients appear in Pascal's triangle, to give a combinatorial proof of the Binomial Theorem, or to compute the sum $1^2+2^2+\ldots+n^2$. All that with virtually no "computation" involved.