If
an interesting question might be “How many derangements are there of
” We know that our answer is bounded above by
We can also expect our answer to be quite a bit smaller than
since
is the image of itself for
of the permutations of
Let be the number of derangements of Our answer will come from discovering a recurrence relation on Suppose that If we are to construct a derangement of then Thus, the image of can be selected in different ways. No matter which of the choices we make, we can complete the definition of in one of two ways. First, we can decide to make leaving ways of completing the definition of since will be a derangement of Second, if we decide to select each of the derangements of can be used to define If is a derangement of such that then define f by
Note that with our second construction of
while in the first construction,
Therefore, no derangement of
with
can be constructed by both methods.
To recap our result, we see that is determined by first choosing one of images of and then constructing the remainder of in one of ways. Therefore,
This homogeneous second-order linear relation with variable coefficients, together with the initial conditions
and
completely defines
Instead of deriving a solution of this relation by analytical methods, we will give an empirical derivation of an approximation of
Since the derangements of
are drawn from a pool of
permutations, we will see what percentage of these permutations are derangements by listing the values of
and
The results we observe will indicate that as
grows,
hardly changes at all. If this quotient is computed to eight decimal places, for
The reciprocal of this number, which
seems to be tending toward, is, to eight places, 2.7182818. This number appears in so many places in mathematics that it has its own name,
An approximate solution of our recurrence relation on
is then