Proving Pascal's Rule : ${{n} \choose {r}}={{n-1} \choose {r-1}}+{{n-1} \choose r}$ when $1\leq r\leq n$

Solution 1:

Consider $n$ balls in a basket. Let there be $1$ red ball and $n-1$ blue balls. Now look at the number of ways of choosing $r$ balls in two different ways

One way is to choose $r$ balls out of the $n$ balls. So the number of ways is $C(n,r)$

The other way is to look at the cases when out of the $r$ balls chosen if we have a red ball or not. We have only two options namely out of the $r$ balls we could have one red ball or no red balls

The number of ways of having $1$ red ball is to choose the one red ball which can be done in $C(1,1)$ ways and choose the remaining $(r-1)$ balls from the $(n-1)$ blue balls which can be done in $C(n-1,r-1)$ ways

Similarly, the number of ways of having no red balls is to choose all the balls as blue balls which can be done in $C(n-1,r)$ ways

These are the only two cases and these are mutually exclusive and hence the total number of ways is $C(n-1,r-1)+C(n-1,r)$

Hence, we get $$C(n,r) = C(n-1,r-1) + C(n-1,r)$$

The same idea could be extended to prove a generalization of the above $$C(m+n,r) = \displaystyle \sum_{k=\max(0,r-n)}^{\min(r,m)} C(m,k) C(n,r-k)$$

Consider a basket with $m$ red balls and $n$ blue balls and we want to count the number of ways in which $r$ balls can be drawn. Argue by two different ways to count (same as above) to prove this.

Solution 2:

Since you mentioned that you were having a hard time visualising this and I always seem to find myself visualising it whenever I have the need to write it down here is what goes through my mind as the pen is moving across the paper:

We are placing $r$ identical balls in $n$ boxes (at most one in each) that are in a straight line, so ${ n \choose r}$ ways to do this, now either the last box is empty, that's ${n-1 \choose r}$ ways, or the last box is full, that's ${ n-1 \choose r-1}$ ways. QED

This is equivalent to Sivaram's answer but does away with the colours, which for the purposes of visualising is probably slightly easier.