Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / Russia — Regional Round /12 of 34

Russia — Regional Round

Geometry Difficulty 5.5 AIME, harder Prove it Russia

Several cardboard rectangles, possibly of different sizes, are put onto a rectangular table; the sides of rectangles are parallel to those of the table. The rectangles may overlap, but there are no two rectangles with four common vertices. May it happen that each point which is a vertex of some rectangle is in fact a vertex of exactly three rectangles?
(I. Bogdanov)

Solution

Figure 1
Рис. 4

На рис. 4 показано, как можно положить три пары прямоугольников так, чтобы для каждой пары все точки AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, GG, HH были вершинами ровно по разу. Одинаковыми точками отмечены вершины одного из прямоугольников пары.

Замечание. Существует много других примеров; один из них указан на рис. 5.

Figure 2
Рис. 5

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