CentralNotice From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search In the context of combinatorial mathematics , stars and bars is a graphical aid for deriving certain combinatorial theorems. It was popularized by William Feller in his classic book on probability. It can be used to solve many simple counting problems, such as how many ways there are to put n indistinguishable balls into k distinguishable bins. [1] 1 Statements of theorems 1.1 Theorem one 1.2 Theorem two 2 Proofs via the method of stars and bars 2.1 Theorem one 2.2 Theorem two 3 Examples 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading Statements of theorems [ edit ] The stars and bars method is often introduced specifically to prove the following two theorems of elementary combinatorics. Theorem one [ edit ] For any pair of positive integers n and k , the number of k - t...