David VanHorn wrote:
> How many different ways are there to arrainge 16 things?

Many.

This is a bad question.  Do you mean you have 16 different things and 16
discrete places to put these thing, how many different combinations are
there?  That at least would be an answerable question.

Imagine what you would do to actually go thru all possible combinations.
You grab the first thing, which you can put in 16 different places.  The
next thing can only go in 15 places, then next in 14, etc.  Since this
operation comes up a lot, especially in statistics, it is given the special
name "factorial", usually written with "!".  So the answer to your problem
is:

  16 factorial = 16! = about 2.09e13

Like I said, many.


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