jancancook
Posts : 1136 Join date : 2011-01-02
| Subject: In mathematics, the notion of permutation Thu Nov 10, 2011 9:10 pm | |
| In mathematics, the notion of permutation is used with several slightly different meanings, all related to the act of permuting (rearranging) objects or values. Informally, a permutation of a set of objects is an arrangement of those objects into a particular order. For example, there are six permutations of the set {1,2,3}, namely (1,2,3), (1,3,2), (2,1,3), (2,3,1), (3,1,2), and (3,2,1). One might define an anagram of a word as a permutation of its letters. The study of permutations in this sense generally belongs to the field of combinatorics. The number of permutations of n distinct objects is n×(n − 1)×(n − 2)×...×2×1, which number is called "n factorial" and written "n!". Permutations occur, in more or less prominent ways, in almost every domain of mathematics. They often arise when different orderings on certain finite sets are considered, possibly only because one wants to ignore such orderings and needs to know how many configurations are thus identified. For similar reasons permutations arise in the study of sorting algorithms in computer science. website design ideasHome Renovations Contractor | |
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