A permutation of is drawn at random. On average, how many fixed points does it have?
Problem 456
Official solution
Consider an table, where the rows correspond to the elements of and the columns to permutations. We mark a 1 in position if the element is a fixed point of the permutation . The number of 1s is counted:
- by rows: each element is a fixed point of permutations,
- by columns: this is the total number of fixed points of all permutations.
Thus, a permutation of has on average fixed point.