MacMahon Partition Analysis: A discrete approach to broken stick problems

Abstract

We propose a discrete approach to solve problems on forming polygons from broken sticks, which is akin to counting polygons with sides of integer length subject to certain Diophantine inequalities. Namely, we use MacMahon's Partition Analysis to obtain a generating function for the size of the set of segments of a broken stick subject to these inequalities. In particular, we use this approach to show that for $n\geq k\geq 3$, the probability that a $k$-gon cannot be formed from a stick broken into $n$ parts is given by $n!$ over a product of linear combinations of partial sums of generalized Fibonacci numbers, a problem which proved to be very hard to generalize in the past.