Dmitri has a collection of identical cubes. Each cube is labelled with the integers 1 to 6 as shown in the following net: the top row contains 5; the middle row contains, from left to right, 4, 6, 3, 1; the bottom row contains 2. (This net can be folded to make a cube.) He forms a pyramid by stacking layers of the cubes on a table, as shown, with the bottom layer being a 7 by 7 square of cubes. Determine the total number of cubes used to build the pyramid. Explain how you got your answer.
Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track
puts 2,604 problems in a working order, from Junior Challenge level to the IMO shortlist.
Source: CEMC, University of Waterloo,
licensed CC-BY-NC-4.0.
Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project. Solutions are the publisher's, linked not copied.