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> several classic problems having to do with balls and bins Can't tell if joke, or wrong audience, or authors out of their topical comfort zone. I think the ty
by puffoflogic 4y ago
> several classic problems having to do with balls and bins
Can't tell if joke, or wrong audience, or authors out of their topical comfort zone. I think the typical way to refer to such problems would be "counting problems".
- consilient 4y agoIt's a stock setup for certain sorts of probability problems.
- soskeufof 4y ago"How do mathematicians get to know each other? Professional psychologists do not seem to have studied this question; I will try out an amateur theory. When two mathematicians meet and feel out each other’s knowledge of mathematics, what they are really doing is finding out what each other’s bottom line is. It might be interesting to give a precise definition of a bottom line; in the absence of a definition, we will give some typical examples." "I will shamelessly tell you what my bottom line is. It is placing balls into boxes, or, as Florence Nightingale David put it with exquisite tact in her book Combinatorial Chance, it is the theory of distribution and occupancy." G-C Rota https://cadadr.org/san-salvador/algebra/bottom-lines.pdf https://cadadr.org/san-salvador/algebra/bottom-lines.pdf Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balls_into_bins_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balls_into_bins_problem