MAT202H5S - Introduction to Discrete Mathematics

Winter 2021

Assignment 1: Due February 5, 2020 (Friday) at 9:00PM.

Answers must be submitted via Crowdmark using your personalized submission link (which will be sent to
your email). Make sure your answer to each question starts in a different file.
Late submissions will not be accepted.

Instructions
A template for this assignment is available on Quercus; you may upload this template to Overleaf and
compile your work there. Check the guide in the notes and the Quercus assignments page for more details
on uploading to Crowdmark.

Q1. Count the number of six-card hands that can be drawn from a standard deck that satisfy all of the
following conditions:
ˆ the hand contains exactly one pair and one three-of-a-kind (and one singleton);
ˆ the rank of the pair must be the highest rank in the hand;
ˆ not all suits are present.

For example, the hand {4♦, 9♦, 9♥, 7♦, 7♥, 7♣} is a valid hand, while {10♦, 9♦, 9♥, 7♦, 7♠, 7♣} is
invalid because it fails the second and third conditions.
(Assume that the ranks from lowest to highest value are A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K.)

Q2. Kiyoko is the marketing manager for a local volleyball club. For club recruitment week she (together
with co-captains Tobio and Shoyo) is assembling a number of swag bags to hand out to students. Kiyoko
custom-orders pens, stickers, keychains, and notepads with their club branding, and leaves Shoyo and
Tobio in charge of placing these items in bags.
The two co-captains are bored (and avoiding having to study) so they decide to make each swag bag
contain a unique assortment of items. This means, for example, that two bags with three pens and one
sticker each are considered identical.

(a) How many unique swag bags can be formed if they place a maximum of four items per bag? Assume
that item supplies never run out, and that the empty bag (with no items) is a valid swag bag.
(b) More students than expected attend club recruitment week, so Kiyoko asks another club member
Kei to make more swag bags. Kei makes bags that have exactly five items each, begrudgingly
sticking to the uniqueness condition that Shoyo and Tobio imposed.
However, they are now in danger of running out of stickers, so Kei places at most two stickers in
each five-item bag. How many swag bags does Kei make?

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Q3. Consider the following 7 × 5 grid, with points A(0, 0) and B(7, 5).

(a) Explain why a lattice path that passes through the point (0, 5) cannot also use the point (1, 4).
Then extend this argument to explain why we can partition the set of lattice paths from A to B
based on which point in
{(i, 5 − i), i = 0, 1, . . . , 5}
is used.
(b) Formulate and prove a combinatorial identity where one side of the equation is the total number
of paths from A to B and the other side is the sum that arises from the partition in (a).
(c) Generalize the identity in (b) to an m × n grid, assuming that m > n.

End of Assignment 1