Section 3.9

You will only be quizzed on the pigeonhole concept. That is you will only be asked to do problems similar to 1-3 from the Exercises.

n objects placed into k boxes requires at least one box to have at least ceil(n/k) objects.

10 objects into 3 boxes ==> at least one box has at least ceil(10/3)=4 objects.

2) You deal a pile of cards, face down, from a standard 52-card deck. What is the least number of cards the pile must have before you can be assured that it contains at least five cards of the same suit?

Think of the four suits as the boxes and the number of cards as the objects.

What is the smallest n such that ceil(n/4) = 5?

17, because ceil(16/4) = 4 and ceil(17/4) = 5.