Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Spring 2017 POTW #1: Nadnerb's Course Schedule

Submissions due by midnight on Sunday January 29, 2017.

Welcome back to Puzzle of the Week, put on by the Emmanuel College Department of Mathematics! If you're new around here, you should know that we'll have a puzzle posted every Monday, with submissions due by Sunday night. You can earn points for your answers, and the top scorers at the end of the academic year (last week of April) will earn prizes.

Here is the first POTW for this semester, just a simple counting problem: 

It's the beginning of the semester, and Nadnerb is looking to fill his schedule. The Mathematics Department is offering 4 different courses, and the Philosophy Department is offering 5 different courses. Nadnerb has to take 4 courses, in total, and he wants to do so by taking either 2 or 3 Math courses (with the rest being Philosophy). How many different possible schedules could Nadnerb create? (You may assume there are no time conflicts between any of the courses.)