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Geometry Difficulty 7.8 National olympiad, round 2 Prove it Slovenia

Given 20 points in space so that no three of them are collinear, prove that the number of planes determined by these points is not equal to 11111111.

Solution

Assume, to the contrary, that the number of planes is equal to 11111111. Now, 2020 points in space can define at most (203)=201918321=1140\binom{20}{3} = \frac{20 \cdot 19 \cdot 18}{3 \cdot 2 \cdot 1} = 1140 planes, so 11401111=291140 - 1111 = 29 triplets of points lie in the planes already determined by another triplet. If one of the planes contains 77 or more points, then there are at least (73)=35\binom{7}{3} = 35 triplets of points in this plane and the number of triplets is greater than the number of planes by at least 351=3435 - 1 = 34. Hence, the greatest possible number of planes is 114034=11051140 - 34 = 1105. Obviously, this cannot happen if there are 11111111 planes, so each plane can contain at most 66 of the points.

Let aa be the number of planes containing 44 points, bb the number of planes containing 55 points and cc the number of planes containing 66 points. When counting triplets, we considered each plane containing 44 points (43)=4\binom{4}{3} = 4 times. That is 33 times too many. Each plane containing 55 points was counted (53)=10\binom{5}{3} = 10 times (i.e. 99 times too many) and each plane containing 66 points was counted (63)=20\binom{6}{3} = 20 times, which is 1919 times too many. The number of planes is thus equal to 11403a9b19c1140 - 3a - 9b - 19c. If this number were equal to 11111111, then we would have 3a+9b+19c=293a + 9b + 19c = 29. The numbers aa, bb and cc are non-negative integers, so c1c \ge 1 is not possible, c=0c = 0. We get 3a+9b=293a + 9b = 29 and this is impossible since the left-hand side is divisible by 33 and the right-hand side is not. We conclude that the number of planes cannot be equal to 11111111.

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