PASCALS TRIANGLE AND COMBINATIONS A REFLECTIVE STUDY -RITIKA AGARWAL, A2

Pascals triangle is a remarkable number pattern originally developed by the ancient Chinese and further studied by Blaise Pascal. It consists of n number of rows, where the first row is numbered n=0 and contains only the number 1. When constructing the elements of the following rows, the number above and to the left is added to the number above and to the right to find the new value, substituting a 0 for any blank spaces.

Though the construction of the triangle is simple, it has a number of interesting patterns contained within it; though the relationship between the method of construction and these patterns was unclear to me. For example, the "shallow diagonals" of Pascal's triangle sum to Fibonacci numbers.

Also, The sum of the elements of a single row is twice the sum of the row preceding it. This is because every item in a row produces two items in the next row: one left and one right. The sum of the elements of row n is equal to 2n.

Another interesting property of Pascals triangle is that each line represents exponents of 11.

From 115 onwards, the digits overlap like this:

There are numerous such properties of Pascals triangle, which make it mathematically very useful. One of the main applications of this triangle is in the field of combinatorics, which can be further extended to the binomial theorem and finally, the binomial distribution in statistics.

The basic idea is that given n number of items, we can calculate how many ways we can choose k items from among those n items, i.e. how many subsets of size k can be chosen from n items, by applying the following formula:

This is known as the formula of combinations, and can also be found from Pascals triangle where n is the row number and k is the position of the required value in the row. For example, if we wanted to find out how many teams of 3 could be selected from among 5 players:

Or n=0 n=1 n=2 n=3 n=4 n=5 1 1 1 1 1 1 K=0 1 2 3 4 5 K=1 1 3 6 10 K=2 1 4 10 K=3 1 5 K=4 1 K=5

This concept is also used in the binomial theorem which states that

( )
Here, the values of ( ) are used as binomial coefficients. Although at first glance the usage of the combinations formula in binomial expansion may seem like coincidence, there is actually a very intuitive reason behind it.

Considering the following expansion: = ( )

There is 1 way of arranging 3 asTherefore the coefficient of a3 is 1.There are 3 ways of arranging 2 as and 1 bTherefore the coefficient of a2b is 3.There are 3 ways of arranging 2 bs and 1 aTherefore the coefficient of b2a is 3. There is 1 way of arranging 3 bsTherefore the coefficient of b3 is 1. From the above example, we can see why the formula for combinations is used in binomial expansion. Binomial theorem can be applied in statistics, and is used to model the binomial distribution. This can be used to figure out probabilities in cases where there are a fixed number of trials and only 2 possible outcomes (e.g. success and failure) where the probabilities for both outcomes are fixed. The probability of one outcome must be equal to 1 minus the probability of the other. For example, the probability of a biased coin landing heads is 0.3. Out of 10 tosses, we need to find the probability of the coin landing heads exactly 6 times. Modelling the number of heads as a continuous random variable X, we can say X follows binomial distribution such that n=10 (where n is the number of trials) and p=0.3 (where p is the probability of the coin landing heads). According to Binomial Distribution, P(X=6) is ( )0.36(1- 0.3)10 6 = 0.037 (approx) The above example shows us how the formula for combinations can be applied to real world scenarios. Applications of Pascals triangle range from problems as simple as these to far more sophisticated topics such as calculus, trigonometry, plane geometry, and solid geometry. Overall, I found Pascals triangle to be a fascinating mathematical phenomenon and look forward to studying its applications further.