How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
Choosing a committee: , and the ordered count
Example
Let be a set with . Two different sets are counted, and naming which is which is the whole discipline of the example.
- The unordered selections of three members of are the elements of , and there are of them.
- The ordered selections of three distinct members, that is the injections , number .
The ratio of the two counts is , which is clause 1 of for ; hence , the quotient is a natural number, and seen concretely: each -element subset arises from exactly ordered selections.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A set with , and the factorials , , (The factorial and the falling factorial , defined by recursion in ).
for , and ( for ; hence , the quotient is a natural number, and , clause 1).
The number of injections of a -element set into an -element set is (The number of injections from a -element set into an -element set is ).
Verification
The two sets are , whose elements are the -element subsets of , and , whose elements are the injective functions from into . They are different sets, and each count below is stated for the set it counts.
The unordered count. By [L2] with , , , that is , so and . By [L1] the set has elements.
The ordered count. By [L4], , and . By [L3] the set has elements.
The two counts are related as clause 1 of [L2] says: . Each -element subset of is the image of exactly injections , so passing from the ordered to the unordered count divides by .
Remarks
- The standard error is to count one set and name the other. "How many ways can a committee of three be chosen from ten people" is the count of only if the committee is unordered; if the three roles are distinguished it is the count of . The two differ by a factor of , and no computation can decide which was meant.
Depends on
- The set $[A]^{k}$ of $k$-element subsets and the binomial coefficient $\binom{n}{k} := \lvert [n]^{k}\rvert$
- $\binom{n}{k}\,k!\,(n-k)! = n!$ for $k \le n$; hence $\binom{n}{k}\,k! = n^{\underline{k}}$, the quotient $n!/(k!(n-k)!)$ is a natural number, and $\binom{n}{k} = \binom{n}{n-k}$
- The number of injections from a $k$-element set into an $n$-element set is $n^{\underline{k}}$
- The factorial $n!$ and the falling factorial $n^{\underline{k}}$, defined by recursion in $\mathbb{N}$
- The cardinality $\lvert A\rvert$ of a finite set
Used by
Nothing in the library uses this result yet.
Dependency tree · next 3 levels
Direct dependencies and their dependencies through the next three levels: 64 results over 21 levels. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, and this result sits at the bottom with a heavier outline. Click the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- Combination (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)
- Binomial coefficient (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)
- Falling and rising factorials (Wikipedia) (standard reference, not scraped)