OEIS A000179: Menage numbers

We dive into A000179, the Menage numbers, and how a simple seating puzzle blossoms into a web of combinatorial ideas. From the classic menage problem—alternating men and women around a circle with no spouses adjacent—to rook-theory interpretations on a wraparound board that forbids the main diagonal, the superdiagonal, and wrap-around corners, these numbers count the valid arrangements under tight constraints. We also see them appear in 3×n Latin rectangles where the second row is a cyclic shift of the first. We'll cover how to compute them via Tuchardt’s inclusion–exclusion formula, the recurrence relations that let you build the sequence term-by-term, and the historical threads—Lucas’s 1891 problem, Tate’s early work, and the broader connections to combinatorics and beyond.

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