Compute Stirling numbers of the second kind

Description

This function computes Stirling numbers of the second kind, S(n, k), which count the number of ways of partitioning n distinct objects in to k non-empty sets.

Usage

Stirling2(n, k)
S2(n, k)

Arguments

Details

The implementation on this function is a simple recurrence relation which defines

S(n, k) = kS(n - 1, k), + S(n - 1, k - 1)

for k > 0 with the inital conditions S(0, 0) = 1 and S(n, 0) = S(0, n) = 0. If n and n have different lengths then expand.grid is used to construct a vector of (n, k) pairs

Value

An vector of Stirling numbers of the second kind

Author(s)

James Curran

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_numbers_of_the_second_kind#Recurrence_relation

Examples

## returns S(6, 3)
Stirling2(6, 3)

## returns S(6,1), S(6,2), ..., S(6,6)
S2(6, 1:6)

## returns S(6,1), S(5, 2), S(4, 3)
S2(6:4, 1:3)

Results