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Coupon collector: when does the last coupon arrive?

Linearity of expectation turns a hard waiting-time problem into a sum of geometric expectations.

Method · Coupon Collector
Intro

Each cereal box has one of $n$ uniformly random coupons. How many boxes until you've seen all $n$? The trick is decomposing the total wait into stages indexed by how many distinct coupons you've already collected.

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Independent · Legal