Let be a subset of such that the following two conditions hold:
* If and are distinct elements of , then .
* If and are distinct odd elements of , then .
What is the maximum possible number of elements in ?
Pick one
Solution
Answer (C): If consists of the positive integers less than or equal to that are congruent to , , or modulo , then every pair of elements in differ by at least , and every pair of odd elements of differ by at least . This set,
satisfies the given conditions and has elements. To see that no larger set satisfies the given conditions, note that if a set satisfies the first condition and some block of consecutive integers contains elements of the set, then those elements would need to be the st, th, th, and th elements in that block, and the two odd numbers among them would differ by , in violation of the second condition. Therefore there are at most elements of among the first positive integers, and at most elements of can be among .