Pigeonhole principle

From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium

Jump to: navigation, search


This article is a stub and thus not approved.
Main Article
Talk
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
 
This is a draft article, under development and not meant to be cited but you can help to improve it. These unapproved articles are subject to a disclaimer.

In discrete mathematics, the Pigeonhole Principle states "if you have ten pigeons and only nine pigeonholes, then at least one of those pigeonholes is shared by more than one pigeon." More formally, for any group of N items which must be assigned to M categories, if N > M, then at least one category must contain more than one item. The pigeonhole principle does not state any more. It does not state how excess items are distributed, or even that all categories are filled.

Views
Personal tools