The Combinatorics of Occam's Razor

Abstract

Occam's Razor tells us to pick the simplest model that fits our observations. In order to make sense of his process mathematically, we interpret it in the context of posets of functions. Our approach leads to some unusual new combinatorial problems concerning functions between finite sets. The same ideas are used to define a nicely behaved and apparently unknown analogue of the rank of a group. We also make a construction that associates with each group an infinite sequence of numbers called its fusion sequence. The first term in this sequence is determined by the rank of the group and we provide examples of subsequent terms that suggest a subtle relationship between these numbers and the structure of the group.