Published on: 2025-07-27 00:00:00
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but for computer scientists, two birds in a hole are better still. That’s because those cohabiting birds are the protagonists of a deceptively simple mathematical theorem called the pigeonhole principle. It’s easy to sum up in one short sentence: If six pigeons nestle into five pigeonholes, at least two of them must share a hole. That’s it—that’s the whole thing. “The pigeonhol
Keywords: computer people pigeonhole principle problems
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