Counting the objects that satisfy some criteria is a very common task in both Programming and in real-life situations. The myriad ways of counting the number of elements in a set is one of the main tasks in combinatorics, and I’ll try to describe some basic aspects of it in this blog. Combinatorics is all about number of ways of choosing some objects out of a collection and/or number of ways of their arrangement. For example suppose there are five members in a club, let's say there names are A, B, C, D, and E, and one of them is to be chosen as the coordinator. Clearly any one out of them can be chosen so there are 5 ways. Now suppose two members are to be chosen for the position of coordinator and co-coordinator. Now, we can choose A as coordinator and one out of the rest 4 as co-coordinator. Similarly we can choose B as coordinator and one of out the remaining 4 as co-coordinator, and similarly with C, D and E. So there will be total 20 possible ways. Combinatorial primitives ...