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Monthly Archives: October 2015

A story instead of stars and bars

In a recent post (Counting the Story), I talked about how if you look closely at most solutions of combinatorics problems, you’ll see that they actually count the story of constructing the object rather than the object itself.
One exception to this is a problem like this:
“The balloon man has a huge collection of balloons in […]

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Making sense of the effective population size formula

I was going to have a punchy title for this post, with a big moral to apply to the future, but I’ve decided I’m just going to describe to you what happened yesterday as I tried to learn some Genetics. You see what you can learn from my experience.
Yesterday I was helping out at the […]

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Counting the story

Combinatorics is one of my favourite topics in discrete maths — that topic which is all about counting the number of ways there are to choose, arrange, allocate or combine things. I like the idea that I could theoretically find out the answer by writing down all the possibilities systematically and literally counting them, but […]

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