Because calculating combinations can give such large numbers, they are often used in advertising. But very rarely do companies bother trying to get the answer correct. When combinatorist (a mathematician who specializes in combinatorics) 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 4 things out of a total of 14 options, so he figured they had 14 toppings and customers could choose 4. Actually, the restaurant had 26 toppings (he asked) and
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