How many different groups of students can show up for a seminar with an enrollment of 17?

What? and How is the answer, 131072?

Question

How many different groups of students can show up for a seminar with an enrollment of 17?

What?  and How is the answer, 131072?

aravindg · Answer

easy

amistre64 · Answer

"easy" doent clarify anything ....

aravindg · Answer

just take diff cases and add

amistre64 · Answer

diff cases of what tho?

aravindg · Answer

u see its said enrollment shud be 17

aravindg · Answer

take case 1 :let there be 17 groups

aravindg · Answer

nxt

aravindg · Answer

9 groups

aravindg · Answer

wait a minute

aravindg · Answer

lemme sort this out

anonymous · Answer

I have no clue for this one, from where did you get this question?

amistre64 · Answer

got it off a myMathLab site. part of some homework questions for a finite math course.

amistre64 · Answer

I like how Arav says "easy" then has to "sort it out". ...

anonymous · Answer

I got it! (with a little bit of help from a friend), actually the problem is easy the main thing is to understand "with an enrollment of 17"; I interpreted as there are 17 people enrolled.

Any subset of the $17$ could show up in the seminar, and we know there are $2^{17}=131072$ subsets of a $17$ element set.