Bell number

In combinatorial mathematics, the Bell numbers count the possible partitions of a set. These numbers have been studied by mathematicians since the 19th century, and their roots go back to medieval Japan, but they are named after Eric Temple Bell, who wrote about them in the 1930s. In combinatorial mathematics, the Bell numbers count the possible partitions of a set. These numbers have been studied by mathematicians since the 19th century, and their roots go back to medieval Japan, but they are named after Eric Temple Bell, who wrote about them in the 1930s. Starting with B0 = B1 = 1, the first few Bell numbers are: The nth of these numbers, Bn, counts the number of different ways to partition a set that has exactly n elements, or equivalently, the number of equivalence relations on it. Outside of mathematics, the same number also counts the number of different rhyme schemes for n-line poems. As well as appearing in counting problems, these numbers have a different interpretation, as moments of probability distributions. In particular, Bn is the nth moment of a Poisson distribution with mean 1. In general, Bn is the number of partitions of a set of size n. A partition of a set S is defined as a set of nonempty, pairwise disjoint subsets of S whose union is S. For example, B3 = 5 because the 3-element set {a, b, c} can be partitioned in 5 distinct ways: B0 is 1 because there is exactly one partition of the empty set. Every member of the empty set is a nonempty set (that is vacuously true), and their union is the empty set. Therefore, the empty set is the only partition of itself. As suggested by the set notation above, we consider neither the order of the partitions nor the order of elements within each partition. This means that the following partitionings are all considered identical: If, instead, different orderings of the sets are considered to be different partitions, then the number of these ordered partitions is given by the ordered Bell numbers. If a number N is a squarefree positive integer (meaning that it is the product of some number n of distinct prime numbers), then Bn gives the number of different multiplicative partitions of N. These are factorizations of N into numbers greater than one, treating two factorizations as the same if they have the same factors in a different order. For instance, 30 is the product of the three primes 2, 3, and 5, and has B3 = 5 factorizations: The Bell numbers also count the rhyme schemes of an n-line poem or stanza. A rhyme scheme describes which lines rhyme with each other, and so may be interpreted as a partition of the set of lines into rhyming subsets. Rhyme schemes are usually written as a sequence of Roman letters, one per line, with rhyming lines given the same letter as each other, and with the first lines in each rhyming set labeled in alphabetical order. Thus, the 15 possible four-line rhyme schemes are AAAA, AAAB, AABA, AABB, AABC, ABAA, ABAB, ABAC, ABBA, ABBB, ABBC, ABCA, ABCB, ABCC, and ABCD.