A clicker question went awry, or did it?
March 23rd, 2010Last week, on a beautiful Friday afternoon before Spring Break, I was teaching my applied combinatorics students about generating functions. We’ll see some of the more powerful things next week, but last week we were focused on the number of integer solutions to an equation in a small number of variables. This is a recurring problem in our class: first we saw it with binomial coefficients, then we saw it with inclusion-exclusion, and now we’re seeing it with generating functions. To make the material less abstract, we were discussing the question in terms of fruit baskets. (You want to make a fruit basket with apples, oranges, bananas, and peaches in it. The number of apples must be even, there must be at least two oranges, there can be no more than six bananas, etc.) Read more »