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Combinatorics Difficulty 7.8 National olympiad, round 2 Prove it Romania

Let nn be an odd integer greater than 11. Each vertex of a regular nn-gon is coloured one of three colours so that the total number of vertices of each colour is odd. Show that there exists an isosceles triangle whose vertices have pairwise distinct colours.

Solution

Suppose, if possible, no such triangles exist, and consider the parity of the total number of pairs (T,e)(T, e), where TT is an isosceles triangle, and ee is an edge of TT whose endpoints have different colors.

On the one hand, under the above assumption, the vertices of a triangle in a pair form a bichromatic set, so the triangle occurs in exactly two pairs, and the total number of pairs is therefore even.

On the other hand, if we fix an edge ee whose endpoints have different colors, the number of isosceles triangles matching ee is either one or three. It is one if ee is the edge of an equilateral triangle. Otherwise, it is three: one triangle with apex at one endpoint of ee, another triangle with apex at the other endpoint of ee, and one more triangle with apex opposite ee, since nn is odd. Since the total number of bichromatic edges is odd, so is the total number of pairs, contradicting the parity established in the previous paragraph.

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