how many ways can 4 men and 4 women be seated at a round table if no 2 men or 2 women are to sit next to each other
The men and women must alternate in position. Imagine there are 4 red seats and 4 blue ones in alternating positions.
If the men sit in the red seats there are 4! = 24 ways of arranging them. For each of these there are 4! ways of seating the women in the blue chairs, so there are 24^2 = 576 ways of doing this.
There are the same number of ways if the men sit in the blue seats and the women are in the red seats, so there are 2*576 = 1152 ways in total.
The above assumes that a rotation of a given arrangement is different from the arrangement of which it is a rotation.
On second thoughts, the men and women changing seat colours just leads to rotations that are equivalent as far as the placement of individuals are concerned, so I think 576 is probably the better solution!
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Thanks Alan :)
I am going to assume that rotations are NOT considered different.
This is what I think
Take any person and sit them anywhere.
Now there are 3 more people of that gender so they can be seted in 3! ways.
There are 4 people of the other gender left, they can be seated in 4! ways.
So altogether that makes 3! * 4! = 6*24 = 144 ways.