Better Ways To Count

Sometimes 1-2-3 just isn’t enough.

What do you do when you’re trying to find the number of ways to arrange 6 people in a line? Or when you’re counting the number of ways to pick 2 ice cream flavors out of 14? Or when you’re figuring out how many ways a pinball might fall to the bottom of the pinball machine?

Maybe 1-2-3 doesn’t solve the problem in these cases, but math can still help us find the answers!

The first tool we can add to our toolbox is factorials. From there we can tackle problems of choosing, which will help us when we count paths. These ideas can help us understand a very important and beautiful mathematical structure called Pascal’s Triangle.

Good luck! Counting is about to become very exciting!