English

Counting Divisions of a $2\times n$ Rectangular Grid

Combinatorics 2021-07-23 v2

Abstract

Consider a 2×n2\times n rectangular grid composed of 1×11\times 1 squares. Cutting only along the edges between squares, how many ways are there to divide the board into kk pieces? Building off the work of Durham and Richmond, who found the closed-form solutions for the number of divisions into 2 and 3 pieces, we prove a recursive relationship that counts the number of divisions of the board into kk pieces. Using this recursion, we obtain closed-form solutions for the number of divisions for k=4k=4 and k=5k=5 using fitting techniques on data generated from the recursion. Furthermore, we show that the closed-form solution for any fixed kk must be a polynomial on nn with degree 2k22k-2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.14755,
  title  = {Counting Divisions of a $2\times n$ Rectangular Grid},
  author = {Jacob Brown},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.14755},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

9 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T03:40:38.643Z