Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 4.9 AIME Prove it Thailand

Each point on the plane is colored either red, green or blue. Prove that there exists an isosceles triangle where all vertices are the same color.

Solution

Consider a circle ω\omega with center OO. Without loss of generality, let OO be red. If there exist two red points on ω\omega not belonging to the same diameter, then these points together with OO form a red isosceles triangle.

Figure 1

On the other hand, if ω\omega contains at most 2 red points lying on a diameter, consider a regular pentagon inscribed in ω\omega with either green or blue vertices. By the pigeonhole principle, at least 3 of its vertices must be the same color. These vertices form an isosceles triangle where all vertices are the same color.

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