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The Pigeonhole Principle

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Extremal Combinatorics

Part of the book series: Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series ((TTCS))

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Abstract

The pigeonhole principle (also known as Dirichlet’s principle) states the “obvious” fact that n + 1 pigeons cannot sit in n holes so that every pigeon is alone in its hole. More generally, the pigeonhole principle states the following:

If a set consisting of more than kn objects is partitioned into n classes, then some class receives more than k objects.

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Jukna, S. (2001). The Pigeonhole Principle. In: Extremal Combinatorics. Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04650-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04650-0_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-08559-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-04650-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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