Number of Acyclic Alkane Isomers
Introduction At the organic chemistry lecture sometimes this question arises: how to find out how many isomers does have an open-chain alkane C n H 2n+2 ? The question has no simple answer. Despite some youtube chemistry teachers offering a ready magic formula, the fact is that the number of isomers has be count separately for each n . In practice, this means generating every possible isomer for a given number of C-atoms. Please refer to the proffesional sources if you need the specific details covering this issue [1,2]. The Goal I wanted to design a simple and comprehensible algorithm for the demonstration purposes. The algorithm should allow counting all possible alkane isomers and could be recreated, modified and employed by users without a deep knowledge of the mathematical sciences. To simplify the task, the stereoisomers will be ignored. The Method In order to calculate all combination of the isomers, I have built the logical scheme shown at the flowchart (Fig. 1) and described