Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.1 AIME, harder Prove it Bulgaria

Problem:

In any cell of an n×nn \times n table a number is written such that all the rows are different. Prove that one can remove a column such that the rows in the new table are still different.

Solution

Solution:

Consider a graph with vertices the lines of the table and edges that join two vertices if the respective lines are different exactly in one position. Write on the edges the respective elements that are different.

Assume that the given statement is not true. Then the graph has nn vertices and nn edges. It is not difficult to prove by induction on nn that there is a cycle in the graph. We may suppose that this cycle is A1A2AkA_{1} A_{2} \ldots A_{k}.

Starting from A1A_{1}, we remove x1x_{1} to get A2A_{2}, then remove or add x2x_{2} to get A3A_{3}, etc. When we turn back to A1A_{1}, we obtain a second copy of A1A_{1} which does not contain x1x_{1} (any edge contains no x1x_{1}), a contradiction.

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