Holger Dambeck's Email Message to Doron Zeilberger, dated May 8, 2012

Hello Mr. Zeilberger,
I'm Holger Dambeck and I write about mathematics on the website of the
German magazine DER SPIEGEL. You can find my math articles here
http://www.spiegel.de/thema/numerator/

My next article will be about the Coupon collector's problem. In
Germany many people collect Panini stickers of scoccer players in the
weeks before the european championship. I saw that you made some
calculations about this topic. May be you can help me with some
numbers.

If there are 540 different stickers like here
http://web.paninigroup.com/de/uefaeuro2012/das-sammelalbum.html you
have to buy 3398 stickers to have them all. Thats quite easy to
calculate, I wrote about this already one year ago
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,770781,00.html

My question to you is: If a collector has bought 3398 stickers and his
album is complete, how many of the 540 stickers he has

twice
triple
quadruple
...
ten times?

I tried to understand your one page paper - but I couldn't. I would be
very happy, if you could help me with this calculation.

Thanks a lot!

Best regards

Holger Dambeck
Ressort Wissenschaft
SPIEGEL ONLINE GmbH
Sitz und Registergericht Hamburg HRB 77 913
Geschäftsführer Katharina Borchert, Matthias Schmolz
Ein Unternehmen der SPIEGEL-Gruppe