ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Pascal's simplex

Okay kiddo, have you ever heard of a math guy named Blaise Pascal? He came up with this really cool way of organizing numbers and equations called Pascal's simplex.

Imagine you have a bunch of numbers that you need to sort through. Pascal's simplex helps you organize them in a really neat way. It looks like a pyramid made of numbers with each row being shorter than the one before it.

The top row has just one number, and then each row below it has one more number than the row above it. The numbers in each row represent combinations of the numbers from the row above it.

So for example, if the top row has the number 1, the next row might have the numbers 1 and 1 because that's the combination of adding the previous two numbers (in this case just 1) together. So it would look like this:

1
1 1

Then the next row would have 1, 2, and 1 because those are the combinations of adding the previous row's numbers together. So it would look like this:

1
1 1
1 2 1

And this keeps going on and on until you have as many rows as you need.

So why is this important? Well, one really cool thing about Pascal's simplex is that it helps you solve problems in statistics and probability. You can use it to calculate things like binomials (which are just fancy ways of counting things), so it's really useful if you need to do some math with a lot of different numbers.

Overall, Pascal's simplex is just a cool way of organizing numbers and figuring out solutions to problems. It may look complicated at first, but hopefully this explanation made it a little easier to understand!