Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /51 of 75

, 2003

Geometry Difficulty 5.4 AIME, harder Prove it Italy

Problem:

A dodecahedron is a regular solid with 12 pentagonal faces. A diagonal of a solid is a segment whose endpoints are two vertices of the solid that do not belong to the same face. How many diagonals does the dodecahedron have?

Solution

Solution:

The answer is 100. We need to count the (unordered) pairs of vertices that do not belong to the same face. At each vertex, 3 faces meet, and in each of them there are 2 vertices that are not on a face that also contains the initial vertex (total 6), plus 2 shared with another face (which are counted twice and are therefore actually 3 in total), plus the vertex itself: so we must exclude from the count 10 vertices that do not give rise to diagonals. But the vertices of the dodecahedron are 125/3=2012 \cdot 5 / 3 = 20 (12 pentagonal faces, but meeting 3 at a time), so for each of these we must consider 2010=1020 - 10 = 10 possible vertices as the other endpoint of a diagonal. In total the diagonals are 2010/2=10020 \cdot 10 / 2 = 100, where we divided by 2 since, by multiplying, each diagonal is counted twice.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from it; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.