There are 9 distinct chairs. How many ways are there to group these chairs into 3 groups of 3?

Aleah Booth

Aleah Booth

Answered question

2022-07-15

There are 9 distinct chairs. How many ways are there to group these chairs into 3 groups of 3?

Answer & Explanation

eri1ti0m

eri1ti0m

Beginner2022-07-16Added 11 answers

Step 1
Are the groups labelled?
The ways of forming a sequences with the chairs is 9!. This doesn't change if we make it in a different way: let's say we first separate them into three labelled groups (N ways, the number we want), then we arrange the order in each group ( 3 ! ) 3 . Thus
9 ! = N ( 3 ! ) 3
N = 9 ! ( 3 ! ) 3
Step 2
If the groups are not labelled we can first label them and then repeat the process, obtaining
N = 9 ! ( 3 ! ) 4
capellitad9

capellitad9

Beginner2022-07-17Added 3 answers

Step 1
Another way: how many ways to create 3 gruops of chair, each one with a number from 1 to 3? We can first divide the chairs into 3 groups of 3 (there are N possibilities, the number we want to compute) and the we assign a number to each gruop (3! ways).
Step 2
We can also choose 3 chairs for the first group, then we choose from the 6 remaining 3 for the second and choose 3 from the 3 left for the last group, thus we have
3 ! N = ( 9 3 ) ( 6 3 ) ( 3 3 ) = 9 ! ( 3 ! ) 3
N = 9 ! ( 3 ! ) 4

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