Permanent (mathematics)

"Permanent" is a math word that means something like "a very special kind of way to multiply numbers together." When you multiply numbers together, you usually just do it once and get an answer. But with permanents, you have to do it a bunch of times and then add up all the answers you got.

It's kind of like when you play with Legos. If you want to make a tall tower, you have to stack one Lego on top of another one, and then add another one on top of that, and so on. With a permanent, you're doing that kind of stacking, but with numbers.

Here's an example: Let's say you have 4 numbers: 1, 2, 3, and 4. To find the permanent of those numbers, you take all the possible ways you can arrange them in a 2x2 square (like a tic-tac-toe board), and then multiply the numbers in each row and each column. So it would look like this:

1 2
3 4

For the first row, you multiply 1 x 2 and get 2. For the second row, you multiply 3 x 4 and get 12. For the first column, you multiply 1 x 3 and get 3. And for the second column, you multiply 2 x 4 and get 8.

Now, you add up all those products: 2 + 12 + 3 + 8 = 25. That's the permanent of those 4 numbers.

Permanents are used in some kinds of math problems to help solve them or figure things out. They can be tricky to work with, but they're also kind of fun to play around with and see what you can come up with.