In fact, I can only afford empty tin cans. Let’s say I’m a cheapskate and can’t afford separate Gold, Silver and Bronze medals. If we have n items total and want to pick k in a certain order, we get:Īnd this is the fancy permutation formula: You have n items and want to find the number of ways k items can be ordered:Ĭombinations are easy going. Where 8!/(8-3)! is just a fancy way of saying “Use the first 3 numbers of 8!”.

What’s another name for this? 5 factorial!Īnd why did we use the number 5? Because it was left over after we picked 3 medals from 8. This is where permutations get cool: notice how we want to get rid of $5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1$. Unfortunately, that does too much! We only want $8 * 7 * 6$. To do this, we started with all options (8) then took them away one at a time (7, then 6) until we ran out of medals. The total number of options was $8 * 7 * 6 = 336$. We picked certain people to win, but the details don’t matter: we had 8 choices at first, then 7, then 6. Silver medal: 7 choices: B C D E F G H.Gold medal: 8 choices: A B C D E F G H (Clever how I made the names match up with letters, eh?).We’re going to use permutations since the order we hand out these medals matters. How many ways can we award a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prize among eight contestants? (Gold / Silver / Bronze) We’re using the fancy-pants term “permutation”, so we’re going to care about every last detail, including the order of each item. Let’s start with permutations, or all possible ways of doing something.

Permutation equation