How Pascal's Triangle is Constructed At the tip of Pascal's Triangle is the number 1, which makes up the zeroth row.
The first row (1 & 1) contains two 1's, both formed by adding the two numbers above them to the left and the right, in this case 1 and 0 (all numbers outside the Triangle are 0's).
Do the same to create the 2nd row: 0+1=1; 1+1=2; 1+0=1. And the third: 0+1=1; 1+2=3; 2+1=3; 1+0=1. In this way, the rows of the triangle go on infinitly. A number in the triangle can also be found by nCr (n Choose r) where n is the number of the row and r is the element in that row.
For example, in row 3, 1 is the zeroth element, 3 is element number 1, the next three is the 2nd element, and the last 1 is the 3rd element. The formula for nCr is:
n!
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r!(n-r)!
! means factorial, or the preceeding number multiplied by all the positive integers that are smaller than the number. 5! = 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 120.
The Sums of the Rows
The sum of the numbers in any row is equal to 2 to the nth power or 2n, when n is the number of the row. For example: