Pigeonhole Principle

In mathematics and computer science, the pigeonhole principle states that if n items are put into m pigeonholes with n > m, then at least one pigeonhole must contain more than one item. This theorem is exemplified in real-life by truisms like "there must be at least two left gloves or two right gloves in a group of three gloves". It is an example of a counting argument, and despite seeming intuitive it can be used to demonstrate possibly unexpected results; for example, that two people in London have the same number of hairs on their heads.

The first formalization of the idea is believed to have been made by Johann Dirichlet in 1834 under the name Schubfachprinzip ("drawer principle" or "shelf principle"). For this reason it is also commonly called Dirichlet's box principle, Dirichlet's drawer principle or simply "Dirichlet principle"—a name that could also refer to the minimum principle for harmonic functions. The original "drawer" name is still in use in French ("principe des tiroirs"), Italian ("principio dei cassetti") and German ("Schubfachprinzip").

Though the most straightforward application is to finite sets (such as pigeons and boxes), it is also used with infinite sets that cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence. To do so requires the formal statement of the pigeonhole principle, which is "there does not exist an injective function on finite sets whose codomain is smaller than its domain". Advanced mathematical proofs like Siegel's lemma build upon this more general concept.

Examples

Softball team

Imagine five people who want to play softball (n = 5 items), with a limitation of only four softball teams (m = 4 holes) to choose from. A further limitation is imposed in the form of each of the five refusing to play on a team with any of the other four players. It is impossible to divide five people among four teams without putting two of the people on the same team, and since they refuse to play on the same team, by asserting the pigeonhole principle it is easily deducible that at most four of the five possible players will be able to play.

Sock-picking

Assuming that in a box there are 10 black socks and 12 blue socks, calculate the maximum number of socks needed to be drawn from the box before a pair of the same color can be made. Using the pigeonhole principle, to have at least one pair of the same color (m = 2 holes, one per colour) using one pigeonhole per color, you need only three socks (n = 3 items). In this example, if the first and second sock drawn are not of the same color, the very next sock drawn would complete at least one same-color pair. (m = 2)

Hand-shaking

If there are n number of people who can shake hands with one another (where n > 1), the pigeonhole principle shows that there is always a pair of people who will shake hands with the same number of people. As the 'holes', or m, correspond to number of hands shaken, and each person can shake hands with anybody from 0 to n − 1 other people, this creates n − 1possible holes. This is because either the '0' or the 'n − 1' hole must be empty (if one person shakes hands with everybody, it's not possible to have another person who shakes hands with nobody; likewise, if one person shakes hands with no one there cannot be a person who shakes hands with everybody). This leaves n people to be placed in at most n − 1 non-empty holes, guaranteeing duplication.

Hair-counting

We can demonstrate there must be at least two people in London with the same number of hairs on their heads as follows. A typical human head has around 150,000 hairs; therefore it is reasonable to assume that no one has more than 1,000,000 hairs on their head (m = 1 million holes). Since there are more than 1,000,000 people in London (n is bigger than 1 million items), if we assign a pigeonhole to each number of hairs on a person's head, and assign people to pigeonholes according to the number of hairs on each person's head, there must be at least two people with the same number of hair on their heads (or, n > m). In the case with the fewest overlaps, there will be at least one person assigned to every pigeonhole, at which point the 1,000,001^st person is assigned to the same pigeonhole as someone else. Of course, there may be empty pigeonholes in which case this "collision" happens before we get to the 1,000,000^th person. The principle just proves the existence of an overlap; it says nothing of the number of overlaps.

The birthday problem

The birthday problem asks that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, what is the probability that some pair of them will have the same birthday. If there are 367 people in the room, we know that there is at least one pair who share the same birthday, as there are only 366 possible birthdays to choose from.

Uses and applications

A generalized version of this principle states that, if n discrete objects are to be allocated to m containers, then at least one container must hold no fewer than  objects, where  is the ceiling function, denoting the smallest integer larger than or equal to x. Similarly, at least one container must hold no more than  objects, where  is the floor function, denoting the largest integer smaller than or equal to x.

A probabilistic generalization of the pigeonhole principle states that if n pigeons are randomly put into m pigeonholes with uniform probability 1/m, then at least one pigeonhole will hold more than one pigeon with probability

where (m)_n is the falling factorial m(m − 1)(m − 2)...(m − n + 1). For n = 0 and for n = 1 (and m > 0), that probability is zero; in other words, if there is just one pigeon, there cannot be a conflict. For n > m (more pigeons than pigeonholes) it is one, in which case it coincides with the ordinary pigeonhole principle. But even if the number of pigeons does not exceed the number of pigeonholes (n ≤ m), due to the random nature of the assignment of pigeons to pigeonholes there is often a substantial chance that clashes will occur. For example, if 2 pigeons are randomly assigned to 4 pigeonholes, there is a 25% chance that at least one pigeonhole will hold more than one pigeon; for 5 pigeons and 10 holes, that probability is 69.76%; and for 10 pigeons and 20 holes it is about 93.45%. If the number of holes stays fixed, there is always a greater probability of a pair when you add more pigeons. This problem is treated at much greater length at birthday paradox.

A further probabilistic generalisation is that when a real-valued random variable X has a finite mean E(X), then the probability is nonzero that X is greater than or equal to E(X), and similarly the probability is nonzero that X is less than or equal to E(X). To see that this implies the standard pigeonhole principle, take any fixed arrangement of n pigeons into m holes and let X be the number of pigeons in a hole chosen uniformly at random. The mean of X is n/m, so if there are more pigeons than holes the mean is greater than one. Therefore, X is sometimes at least 2.