You're seasoning a curry. Six tastes are available — astringent, bitter, sour, pungent, saline, sweet. How many distinct taste-combinations can you make? In 850 CE, Mahāvīra wrote the answer — the general nCr formula, in five lines of Sanskrit prose — and posed exactly this question to his readers. Pingala's Chandahsastra (~200 BCE) had the binomial-prosody special case; Pascal's Traité gives the systematic European form 804 years after Mahāvīra.