Combinatorics problem involving teams. A company has 10 men and 18 women. A work team consists of two workers. What is the maximum number of work teams (man-man,woman-woman,man-woman) that can be formed from this group? How many different ways can this maximum number of work teams be formed?

Julian Werner

Julian Werner

Answered question

2022-09-05

Combinatorics problem involving teams (Discrete math)
A company has 10 men and 18 women. A work team consists of two workers. What is the maximum number of work teams (man-man,woman-woman,man-woman) that can be formed from this group? How many different ways can this maximum number of work teams be formed? I know the max amount of teams is 14. I tried 28 choose 2 for the maximum number of team combinations but it's wrong.

Answer & Explanation

Isaiah Haynes

Isaiah Haynes

Beginner2022-09-06Added 16 answers

Step 1
Since gender doesn't restrict anything, and people are unique individuals, we just need to count ways to divide twenty-eight people into fourteen pairs.
Step 2
There are 28! ways to line everyone up, then split into 14 pairs. However, each pair can be formed in 2! ways, and we don't care about the 14! ways to arrange the teams either.
28 ! 2 ! 14 14 !
Holly Schmidt

Holly Schmidt

Beginner2022-09-07Added 10 answers

Step 1
Imagine pairing people off one group at a time. For the first group, you've got 28 choose 2 possible ways to pick a team of 2 from 28 people. After you've selected that team, you've got to pick another team of 2 from the remaining 26 people, so 26 choose 2. Continue on in that manner until you've assigned all the teams, and the total number of possibilities so far is:
( 28 2 ) ( 26 2 ) ( 2 2 ) = 28 ! 2 ! 26 ! 26 ! 2 ! 24 ! 2 ! 2 ! 0 ! = 28 ! 2 14 .
Step 2
This gives you all the different ways you could pick teams if the order you were picking them mattered (i.e., if you were picking a "team 1", "team 2", etc.). Since it doesn't, you want to divide this result by the number of labellings you can give to the same set of 14 teams, which is 14!. Hence, the number of ways of splitting 28 people into teams of two is
( 28 2 ) ( 26 2 ) ( 2 2 ) 1 14 ! = 28 ! 26 ! 2 ! 2 14 26 ! 24 ! 2 ! 14 ! = 28 ! 2 14 14 !

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