by akash ganguly
hello! i have a fun piece of math for you that i think really characterizes a few of the things i love about math so much — the multitude of different viewpoints on the same topic, and the use of abstraction. i hope to highlight the value of these ideas! i try to focus on the mathematics and building intuition, so most of the definitions are purely intuitionistic and are not ‘rigorous’. if anyone is curious, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or look it up! let’s get started
here’s our friend alice.
hi alice!
as you can see, she really loves breaking down numbers. she could do any number if she really tried.
by the way alice, why do you have those blocks?
a partition of a number is a way of breaking down a number such that its parts sum to our original number. for instance, as alice pointed out, 5 can be written in many ways. here are all of the partitions of 5.
5
4+1
3+2
3+1+1
2+2+1