An interesting proof of inclusive-exclusive principle

七月 13, 2009 at 1:34 下午 | In Maths(数学) | Leave a Comment

Inclusive-Exclusive Principle (one form): There are N objects which may or may not be with property \alpha, \beta, \gamma,\cdots. Then the number of objects which don’t have any of those properties would be the following:

N-N_\alpha-N_\beta-\cdots

+N_{\alpha \beta}+N_{\alpha\gamma}+\cdots

-\cdots

where N_\alpha denote the number of objects which are with the property \alpha, and N_{\alpha \beta} denote the number of objects which are with both the property \alpha and the property \beta.

Proof. Denote the above formula as (A), we try writing down this formula in another way. We split it as the sum of N different formulas, according to each paticular object. For an object with exact k properties, for example, we take 1 our of N to represent this object. Then note that there are exact k N_\alphas which count our fixed object. Thus we take a -k  out of   -N_\alpha-N_\beta-\cdots. With the same token, we get the following N terms:

‘0′:1

\cdots

‘0′:1

‘1′:1-1

\cdots

‘k’:$latex  1- \{k\choose 1\}+ \{k\choose 2\}-\cdots = (1-1)^k =0$

k denote the object with k different properties.

In fact, except for the first L ‘1’s, all the rest sum to zero. We can thus conclude that the formula (A) is the number of objects with not any above properties.

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