Calculate the number of the arrangements of 5 girls , , , and and 12 boys in a row satisfying the following conditions:
1. The order of the girls from left to right is , , , and .
2. There are at least 3 boys between and .
3. There are at least 1 boy and at most 4 boys between and .
Solution
Recall that the number of natural solutions of the equation
is . We will use this fact to calculate the number of the arrangements of boys and girls satisfying the given conditions.
Let be the number of boys standing between and for ; be the number of boys standing on the left of , and be the number of the boys standing on the right of . Then we have , , and
Replacing for and , we have
where and . Putting into (9), we conclude that the number of solutions satisfying (9) is
Since we can permute the boys in the row, the total number of arrangements of boys and girls satisfying the given conditions is .
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