![The 14-C-3 gifts of Christmas?](http://mrburkemath.net/xwhy/images/952pascal01.png)
The 14C3 gifts of Christmas?
This occurred to me a while ago, but after Christmas, and I decided that it couldn't wait until December. (And I'd likely forget about it.)
While coming up with mathematical formulas and computer code for calculating this number, I overlooked a a very reliable reference tool: Pascal's Triangle.
It has more uses than simply expanding polynomials because of its many properties.
Some of these properties are as follows:
What this means is that for any given day in that song (The Twelve Days of Christmas):
Applying this to the 12th day of the song:
And I could've been finished a whole lot sooner. But I wouldn't have gotten a recursive comic out of that.
One last thing: Did you ever try to make a poster of Pascal's Triangle? Have your students tried to do it for a math fair? The numbers start to get really big in the middle, really fast. (That's a post for another day.) But that's also why the poster in this comic is so large! Otherwise, it wouldn't be readable (and I had to modify the "364" so you could find it easily!).
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