Imagine you have a bunch of Lego bricks of different sizes and colors, and you want to build a big castle out of them. You can't just pile them up randomly - you need to put them together in specific ways to get the castle to look right.
Now imagine you have two smaller castles already built, made out of some of those Lego bricks. Let's call these smaller castles A and B. The littlewood-richardson coefficient is a way to figure out how many more bricks you need to build a bigger castle that combines both A and B.
To find the coefficient, you need to line up the bricks from each castle in certain patterns, like fitting puzzle pieces together. Then you count how many different ways you can do this that result in a new, bigger castle. This number tells you the littlewood-richardson coefficient.
It's useful in math because it can help solve problems related to algebra and geometry. But at its heart, it's just a way to figure out how to combine Lego castles.