Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 6.1 National olympiad Prove it Estonia

There are 8 distinct points marked on a circle. Juku wants to draw as many triangles as possible in such a way that all vertices of each triangle he draws are at the marked points, and no two of these triangles share a side. Find the largest number of triangles that can be drawn under these conditions.

Solution

Assume w.l.o.g. that the points marked on the circle are equally spaced and number the marked points counterclockwise with natural numbers 00, 11, \ldots, 77. Consider a triangle with vertices marked at points 00, 11, 33 and its 77 copies obtained by rotating the original triangle counterclockwise by 18\frac{1}{8}, 28\frac{2}{8}, \ldots, 78\frac{7}{8} of a full turn around the center of the circle (illustrated in Fig. 29 with different colors). These 88 triangles do not share any sides because all sides of the original triangle have different lengths, and each rotation of a side with a specific length results in different segments. Therefore, it is possible to draw 88 triangles under the given conditions.

Figure 1
Fig. 29

On the other hand, note that from each marked point, at most 77 segments can be drawn to the remaining marked points. Each triangle uses either 00 or 22 of these segments. Thus, each marked point can be the endpoint of at most 66 different triangle sides in total. Since we count each side twice (once at each endpoint), there can be at most 862\frac{8 \cdot 6}{2}, or 2424 different triangle sides. Since each triangle has 33 sides, there can be at most 243\frac{24}{3}, or 88 triangles.

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