Permutations Formula

In the previous node, you ordered an entire group. But sometimes you just need to select some elements in a certain order.
For example, if 10 students enter a poetry contest and you again need to pick 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place. How many ways could you pick them? 10! would give you the number of ways to order all 10 contestants, but you just need to pick 3.

(Scroll down for the solution.)

You multiply for each possibility like before, but stop once you've chosen the 3 winners. In this case the solution would be:
10 x 9 x 8,
since then all 3 winners have been chosen. Notice that this is equivalent to:

10 * 9 * 8 * 7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1
7 * 6 * 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1

or, in more concise form:
10!
7!   =  720

General Rule
Whenever you need to permute r from n elements, you can just multiply n*(n-1)*(n-2)... until you've selected r elements. Notationally, this is equivalent to:

The shortcut for this formula is "permute" or "P". So instead of typing it all out by hand, you can just type
(n permute r) in a calculating device.
In the poetry contest example, you could just do (10 permute 3) = 720. However, you sometimes need to know how permutations work, since the formula cannot be applied in all cases.