Peter Cameron went to a pancake restaurant in Canada he noticed that they advertised a choice of ‘1,001 toppings’. Being a combinatorist, he recognized that 1,001 is the total number of ways to pick four things out of a total of fourteen options, so he figured they had fourteen toppings and customers could choose four. Actually, the restaurant had twenty-six toppings (he asked) and had picked ‘1,001’ just because it sounded big. Had they done the maths correctly, those twenty-six toppings in fact allowed for 67,108,864 options. A rare case of marketing understatement.
