Maths Olympiad Prep

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Number theory Difficulty 5.9 AIME, harder Prove it India

Problem:

Let X={0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}X=\{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9\}. Let SXS \subseteq X be such that any nonnegative integer nn can be written as p+qp+q where the nonnegative integers p,qp, q have all their digits in SS. Find the smallest possible number of elements in SS.

Solution

Solution:

We show that 5 numbers will suffice. Take S={0,1,3,4,6}S=\{0,1,3,4,6\}. Observe the following splitting:

nnaabb
000
101
211
303
413
514
633
734
844
936

Thus each digit in a given nonnegative integer is split according to the above and can be written as a sum of two numbers each having digits in SS.

We show that S>4|S|>4. Suppose S4|S| \leq 4. We may take S=4|S|=4 as adding extra numbers to SS does not alter our argument. Let S={a,b,c,d}S=\{a, b, c, d\}. Since the last digit can be any one of the numbers 0,1,2,,90,1,2, \ldots, 9, we must be able to write this as a sum of digits from SS, modulo 10. Thus the collection
A={x+y(mod10)x,yS} A=\{x+y \quad(\bmod 10) \mid x, y \in S\}
must contain {0,1,2,,9}\{0,1,2, \ldots, 9\} as a subset. But AA has at most 10 elements ((42)+4)\left(\binom{4}{2}+4\right). Thus each element of the form x+y(mod10)x+y(\bmod 10), as x,yx, y vary over SS, must give different numbers from {0,1,2,,9}\{0,1,2, \ldots, 9\}.

Consider a+a,b+b,c+c,d+da+a, b+b, c+c, d+d modulo 10. They must give 4 even numbers. Hence the remaining even number must be from the remaining 6 elements obtained by adding two distinct members of SS. We may assume that even number is a+b(mod10)a+b(\bmod 10). Then a,ba, b must have same parity. If any one of c,dc, d has same parity as that of aa, then its sum with aa gives an even number, which is impossible. Hence c,dc, d must have same parity, in which case c+d(mod10)c+d(\bmod 10) is even, which leads to a contradiction. We conclude that S5|S| \geq 5.

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