Here is a puzzle about combinatorics.
Suppose you have a square grid with $n^2$ points. You want to go from the origin $(0, 0)$ to $(n-1, n-1)$. Assuming you can only go right or up, in how many ways can you reach destination?
Here is a puzzle about combinatorics.
Suppose you have a square grid with $n^2$ points. You want to go from the origin $(0, 0)$ to $(n-1, n-1)$. Assuming you can only go right or up, in how many ways can you reach destination?
Its a very common problem. Using google just for a bit would already have brought you very detailed answers: http://www.joaoff.com/2008/01/20/a-square-grid-path-problem/
Hint: start filling in a piece of graph paper with the number of ways to get to points near (0,1). How many ways are there to get to (0,2)? to (1,1)? to (2,0)? Can you see a pattern?
Hint: Since you can move either right or up at each step, you can encode a path from $(0,0)$ to $(n-1,n-1)$ using a sequence of letters R and U. For example, if you have a $4 \times 4$ grid, a sequence R,U,R,U,R,U will take you from $(0,0)$ to $(3,3)$. Now try and generalize to the $n \times n$ grid and count the number of possible strings.