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Balls in Boxes: Variations on a Theme of Warren Ewens and Herbert Wilf

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Advances in Combinatorics

Abstract

We discuss, from an experimental mathematics viewpoint, a classical problem in epidemiology recently discussed by Ewens and Wilf, that can be formulated in terms of “balls in boxes”, and demonstrate that the “Poission approximation” (usually) suffices.

To Herbert Saul Wilf (b. June 13, 1931), on his 80-th birthday

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References

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Eugene Zima for helpful corrections. Accompanied by Maple package http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/tokhniot/BallsInBoxes. Sample input and output can be gotten from: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimhtml/bib.html. Supported in part by the National Science Foundation of the United States of America.

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Correspondence to Doron Zeilberger .

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Ekhad, S.B., Zeilberger, D. (2013). Balls in Boxes: Variations on a Theme of Warren Ewens and Herbert Wilf. In: Kotsireas, I., Zima, E. (eds) Advances in Combinatorics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30979-3_8

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