Does this make sense? Think about how we would pick a license plate. How many choices we would have? First, we need to pick the first letter. There are 26 choices. Now for each of those, there are 26 choices for the second letter: 26 second letters with first letter A, 26 second letters with first letter B, and so on. We add 26 to itself 26 times. Or quicker: there are \(26 \cdot 26\) choices for the first two letters.
in-context