Introduction to Combinatorics

Most of us remember learning to count to ten on our fingers, and maybe to twenty if we included all our toes. Eventually, we picked up more sophisticated methods of counting, such as by three's, five's, hundred's and so on. Combinatorics is an area of mathematics concerned with counting; it gives us an efficient way to count without having to list items one by one. Sometimes, we care about the order which we count things (such as the combination for a lock), and other times, order is not important (like the way you organize your hand in a game of poker). Combinatorics is also related to many other topics in mathematics including probability, geometry, graph theory, cryptography, and many others. 

In "Introduction to Combinatorics," students will be able to explain the difference between a permutation and combination; evaluate expressions involving factorials; and determine the probability of events as a fraction, decimal, and percent.