A counting problem, and a real problem with counting

How many ways can we give eleven identical candies to four children? it is obviously possible (necessary) for some to get more than others, and there is not even a guarantee that each child gets something.

That’s equivalent to asking how many solutions there are to:

(including 0 in the natural numbers).

Now, you could give all eleven to the oldest, all eleven to the second oldest,… Or ten to the oldest and one to the second oldest, and ten to the oldest and one to the second youngest… This is going to be a long-ish list. In fact, I chose numbers just big enough that listing them would be an awkward exercise.

Solving the same problem, with smaller numbers, might help. Let’s give three candies to three kids:

Now we can make a list. I’m just writing numbers. 201 means two for the oldest, none of the middle, one for the youngest.

300, 210, 201, 120, 111, 102, 030, 021, 012, 003.

That’s ten ways.

But how do we scale this up?

One way, a common way, is to turn the numbers into a graphic. Lay the three candies out, and like the divider at the supermarket checkout, put in a physical barrier between the first kid’s loot and the second’s.  For 201 we can write ++//+. The pluses represent candies. So this is two candies for the first kid, then a divider, then another divider right away which means nothing for the middle kid, and one candy after the last divider for the littlest kid. If instead we were giving all three to the middle child, that would look like:  /+++/. Nothing for the oldest, all in the middle, nothing for the youngest.

Why are there three pluses? Three candies. Why are there only two dividers? There is one less divider than the number of kids.

So we can restate our problem as: How many arrangements are there of //+++?

Well, that’s a question with a well-known answer: where 5! would be the arrangements of five things that are all different from each other, and 3! divides out the repetitions of +s and the 2! the repetition of /s.

A small, but important note: Any slash-plus pattern can be converted into kids and candies:  //++//++++++/+ would be 002061. And any candy-kid distribution can be converted into slashes and pluses: 222201 would be ++/++/++/++//+.

We might as well answer the original question. Eleven candies? four kids? That’s all the arrangements of eleven pluses and three slashes: +++++++++++/// which is which is 364 ways.

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The April COVID-19 surge took John Horton Conway from us. Otherwise, he might have told us who created the Confederate monument that stands in combinatorics, that we need to take down.

Conway paid attention to credit. While on sabbatical in 2013 I took a Number Theory class with him. His historical tangents were fascinating. He not only knew who had come up with “if and only if” – but over a half century later, he was still a little jealous. And a little annoyed that his “unless and except unless” or some such, which he thought much more useful, never came into popular use. He kept track of politics, too. There was a story about a German mathematician with questionable choices of friends during the war… I often think that I should have ignored the number theory, and instead taken detailed notes on the mathematicians. The gossip-y stuff would have filled a paper, or maybe been the start of a book…

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My “pluses and slashes,” or “pluses and dividers,” I have been calling them that for a while. I privately chose not to use the more common name. John Horton Conway probably could have told me who came up with the common name – and whether they were being clever, or cute, or political.

In any case, *||**|*** for 1023 is conventionally referred to as “stars and bars” and if not an intentional Confederate monument is at least an unnecessary and unwelcome Confederate reference.

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I was talking to Sue Van Hattum yesterday, and she had not realized this, and was – rightly – horrified. She posted on Facebook. I told her I would blog about it. Which I am doing.

I checked my shelf. A dozen books on the topic, and only one reference I could find (they may be there, but unindexed). But on the web? All over the place. Lots of guides for secondary school mathematics. Texts in computer science and discrete mathematics. And some lecture notes by college professors.

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Where next?

1. Get a new name
2. Get rid of the old name

I admit that the old name “sounded” nice – it rhymed. And in comparison “pluses and slashes”? Meh. But I’ll take it. A better suggestion would be, well, better. Art of Problem Solving uses Balls and Urns (as well as the other), but that doesn’t really sound better. And it does not translate into this:  ++//++/+. I don’t see balls and urns. I see pluses and slashes. Sue suggested a relationship to 11001101, and there is a one to one correspondence, but the 0s aren’t really dividers, and I’d like to save them for something else.

And no need to wait for 1. before moving on 2. Do them both, simultaneously. Reach teachers, mathematicians, and eventually publishers? This should be easy.