On a combinatorial problem in the Secret Santa ritual
History and Overview
2020-03-16 v1
Abstract
The Secret Santa ritual, where in a group of people every member presents a gift to a randomly assigned partner, poses a combinatorial problem when considering the probabilities involved in the formation of pairs, where two persons exchange gifts mutually. We give different possible derivations for such probabilities by counting fixed-point-free permutations with certain numbers of 2-cycles.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2003.06269,
title = {On a combinatorial problem in the Secret Santa ritual},
author = {Alexander Steinicke and Markus Penz and Bine Penz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.06269},
year = {2020}
}