How many different ways can you group these letters into groups of 4, 4 and 6?

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The problem involves grouping the letters of the phrase "MATH HELP BOARDS," which consists of 14 letters including two A's and two H's, into groups of 4, 4, and 6. Sudharaka provided a solution that calculates the total number of permutations considering letter repetitions, resulting in \(N = \frac{14!}{2! \times 2!} = 21794572800\). If permutations of the same group are not counted, the solution changes to \(\frac{ \binom{14}{4} \binom{10}{4} \binom{6}{6}}{2! 2!}\). Both methods yield significant insights into combinatorial mathematics.

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MATH HELP BOARDS

is three words. The first word contains 4 letters, the second 4 letters and the third 6 letters. How many different ways can you group these letters into groups of 4, 4 and 6?

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Congratulations to the following members for their correct solutions:

1) Sudharaka

Solution (from Sudharaka):

[sp]This problem is unfortunately ambiguous. I didn't specify if permutations of the same group count or not. If they do count, then here is Sudharaka's solution.
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Altogether there are 14 letters and there are two A's, two H's. All the other letters occur only once. If there are 14 different letters then there are \(14!\) different permutations. Let \(N\) be the number of permutations considering the repetitions of letters. For each permutation the two A's can be interchanged. Similarly the two H's can also be interchanged. Therefore,

\[2!\times 2!\times N=14!\]

\[\Rightarrow N=\frac{14!}{2!\times 2!}=21794572800\]

Finally each permutation above can be grouped into three groups of 4, 4, 6 letters. Hence the number of ways that the letters can be formed into the three groups of 4, 4, 6 letters is also, \(21794572800\).
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If permutations of the same group don't count, then the solution is:

[math]\frac{ \binom{14}{4} \binom{10}{4} \binom{6}{6}}{2! 2!}[/math] [/sp]
 

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