- Welcome again everyone.

Last lecture, we talked about permutations

and now we want to talk about partial permutations.

These are permutations where you don't want to

arrange all the objects that you have,

but just some subset.

So we know that the number of ways

to arrange n objects is n factorial

and we would like to determine how many ways,

or in how many orders,

can you arrange some of the n objects.

So for example,

let's look at PINs that consist of two digits.

So if you allow any digits,

then, for example, 11 or 45,

in other words, you allow things to repeat,

then, the total number of PINs that you have

is ten times ten.

Ten for the first choice and ten for the second choice,

so it's ten times ten which is 100.

On the other hand,

if you insist on the digits being distinct

then, for example,

you allow 05 and 32 but not 33, because three repeats,

then you have ten options for the first digit

and nine options for the second digit

and the total number of ways you can do it

is ten times nine, which is 90.

Similarly, if you look at three letter words,

then if you allow any letters,

for example, mom or xyz,

so for example here we see repetition,

then you have 26 for each letter

so 26 cubed is the total number of

three letter words that you can come up with,

but if you insist on distinct letters,

and you allow things like abc but not dad,

then the number of different sequences you can have

is you have 26 options for the first letter,

and then 25 for the second, 24 for the third,

so you just get this product.

And as you can see,

it's just the calculation that we did for permutations,

except that we're not going all the way down to one,

but we're just finding just three out of this 26 elements.

In other words,

what we're counting here is we're saying we have 26 elements

in this case, for example, the 26 letters

and we don't want to arrange all of them,

but we want to arrange three of them.

The question is how many ways can we do it.

And another way to view this thing

in a completely identical way

is to say that we are looking instead of sequences

where we allow all possible sequences,

this would give us the Cartesian product,

now we're looking at sequences

where we insist that all the elements are distinct.

Okay, so that's another view of the same problem.

So how many partial permutations are there?

We call such permutations where you have n objects

and you want to arrange k of them,

we call it a permutation of k out of n objects,

or we call it a k-permutation of n.

And we want to calculate

how many such k-permutations of n there are.

So as we just said,

there are n ways to write the first element,

and then n minus one to select the second element

and so on until we get to n minus k plus one

to select the kth element,

right, 'cause it's n for the first one

and n minus one for the second

so it's going to be n minus k plus one for the kth element.

And this number, we can easily see

that we can continue it up to, if you want,

times n minus k all the way down, times one

and then divide by this ending

so we get that this is

n factorial divided by n minus k factorial.

And we denote this by n to the k with an underline.

That's what we call it today,

kth falling power of n.

And some people denote it by P(n,k),

for permutation of n elements where we take just k of them.

So here are some values of the kth falling power of n

for small values of k.

So for k equals one, n to the one falling power is just n.

For k equals two it's n times n minus one.

For k equal to three,

it's n times n minus one times n minus two

and so on up to k,

it's n times n minus one times n minus k plus one

as we define it to be.

So, let's finish with an example of partial permutations.

So imagine that you have five programming books,

five probability books and six machine-learning books.

And you wonder how many ways can you write a list

that contains two books from each subject

where books from the same subject are listed consecutively,

namely next to each other.

So we wonder how many such sequences there are.

Examples of lists like that would be

the third probability book, the first probability book,

and then the fifth machine-learning book

and the second machine-learning book,

and programming book number one

and programming book number four.

We can see that the probability books are listed together.

The machine-learning books are listed together

and the programming books are listed together.

Or machine-learning two and machine-learning six

followed by programming one, programming two

and so on again all the books from the same topic

are listed next to each other.

So we wonder how many such sequences there are.

So we're going to use a combination

of factorials and permutations

and in some sense we're using the product rule many times.

And they will show that the answer is three factorial

times four to the second falling power

times five to the second falling power

times six to the second falling power.

To see that, notice that to first decide

we can first decide on the order of the topics.

For example, here machine-learning, programming,

and then probability.

So there are three different topics

and the number of ways to arrange them

is therefore three factorial

to decide on the order of the subjects

like here's machine learning, programming, and probability.

And then once we do that,

we need to decide which machine-learning book

we're going to choose first

and which one we're going to choose second.

And because there are six machine learning books

I'm sorry,

which programming book we're going to put first

and which programming book we're going to put second.

'Cause there are four programming books,

then we have four to the second falling power

number of ways to do that

because we can decide on the first programming book

and then the second programming book

and then we can decide on which probability books

we're going to choose

and since there are five of them

we have five to the second falling power

or five times 4 ways of doing that

and then we need to decide which machine-learning books

we are listing and in what order

and we have six ways to choose the first one

and five to do the second one

or in other words we have

six to the second falling power to do that.

And we take the product of all these,

by the product rules

because we are making a decision for the order

and making a separate decision

for which programming books we choose,

which probability books we choose, and so on,

so we take the product,

we get the total number of ways of writing such lists.

So we have talked about permutations

and we've talked about partial permutations

and next time we'll talk about combinations.

See you then.

End of transcript. Skip to the start.

POLL

How many partial permutations are there for a 4-digit number where no two consecutive numbers are
the same?

5040
6561

7290

10000