.specialists in a broad range of fleltis h.a¥e' to deal with problems that involve colJ1.1Un.atiQlrs
made up of letters, numbers, or any other objects.
'The department head in a factory has to allocate
production assignments to machine-tool opera-
tors, the agronomist has to decide on what crops
to grow on a selected group of fields, the school
principal draws up schedules of lessons, the
investigating chemist analyzes relations involv-
ing a toms and molecules, the linguist examines
the meanings of combinations of letters in an
unknown language, and so forth. The field of
mathematics that studies problems of how many
different combinations (subject to certain restric-
tions) can be built out of a specific number of
{)bjects is called combinatorial mathematics (com-
binatorics)