We discuss Bose’s notion of indistinguishability at the combinatorial level as introduced by him in his seminal 1924 paper. We further describe its extension in a quantum mechanical setting and discuss various quantum statistics (including Bose and Fermi) describing N identical and indistinguishable particles. We also show how the theory of symmetric functions can be utilised to express the partition functions for all such statistics in terms of Schur functions.
