Given a permutation of , let to be the number of fixed points of - that is, the number of such that . If is the set of all possible permutations , compute (Here, a permutation is a bijective mapping from to .)
Solution
First, note that where if all are fixed points of and 0 otherwise. (The 's need not be distinct.) Switching the order of summation, we find that the desired sum is Note that the inner sum is equal to the number of permutations on that fix , and . This depends on the number of distinct values the s take. If they take on exactly distinct values, then the inner sum will evaluate to !, because can be any permutation of the remaining elements. (For example, if but , and are distinct, the inner sum is 2010 ! because can be any permutation that fixes , and .) Now, suppose we are given which of the are equal (for example, we could be given but mutually distinct, as per the above example). Assuming there are distinct values among the , there are ways to choose the . At this point, there are ! ways to choose on the remaining values such that it fixes the , for a total of 2013! choices for such that and the satisfy the correct equality relations. Thus the answer is 2013 ! times the number of ways to choose equivalence classes on the , so the problem reduces to finding the number of ways to partition 4 elements into nonempty sets. This process can be accelerated by doing casework based on the number of sets: (a) One set must contain all four elements, only one possibility. (i.e. all the s are equal) (b) Either one set contains 3 elements and the other contains the fourth (4 possibilities) or one set contains 2 elements and the other contains the other two (3 possibilities). (i.e. there are two distinct values of ) (c) One set contains two elements, the other two each contain one. There are ways to choose the two elements in the set with two elements, and this uniquely determines the partition. (i.e. there are three distinct values of ) (d) All sets contain one element, in which case there is only one possibility. (i.e. all the are distinct) Thus the number of ways to construct such a partition is , and our answer is !