Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.3 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:
How many ways are there to arrange the numbers {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}\{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8\} in a circle so that every two adjacent elements are relatively prime? Consider rotations and reflections of the same arrangement to be indistinguishable.

Solution

Solution:
Note that 66 can only be adjacent to 11, 55, and 77, so there are (32)=3\binom{3}{2} = 3 ways to pick its neighbors. Since each of 11, 55, and 77 is relatively prime to every number in {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}\{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8\} but itself (and hence can have arbitrary neighbors), without loss of generality suppose we have picked 11 and 55 as neighbors of 66. Observe that fixing the positions of 11, 55, and 66 eliminates the indistinguishability of rotations and reflections.

Now, we have to consecutively arrange {2,3,4,7,8}\{2,3,4,7,8\} so that no two of 22, 44, and 88 are adjacent. There are 3!2!=123! \cdot 2! = 12 ways of doing so, so the final answer is 312=363 \cdot 12 = 36.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.