Problem:
For integer , let denote the number of functions such that for all , and let denote the number of functions such that , , and for all . Prove that .
Problem:
For integer , let denote the number of functions such that for all , and let denote the number of functions such that , , and for all . Prove that .
Solution:
We first note that the condition for is equivalent to for all . Letting , we see this is equivalent to saying that is decreasing. Thus, we only need that ; in other words, we only require the statement to be true for .
Fix . For any function satisfying the conditions for , we construct a function satisfying the conditions for as follows. For a given function and , say that has an up step at if , and say it has a down step at otherwise. We see that must be composed of up steps and down steps. Let be the indices for which down steps occur, in ascending order. Let be the function such that for . By our argument in the first paragraph, it suffices to show that for , or that . If this were not the case for some , then there would be at least 1 down step in between and , a contradiction, so the condition indeed holds.
We now claim that this construction is a bijection. For injectivity, note that for any two distinct , there exists a for which the values of are distinct, in which case the functions must be distinct. For surjectivity, consider any suitable . Let be the function such that for all . (The range of this function is still .) Then, we can find a as follows: for each in sequence, have make up steps until it reaches the value , then take one down step. This is always possible, as . Thus, our claim is true, and our proof is complete.