Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 5.7 AIME, harder Prove it Saudi Arabia

Determine all positive integers n3n \geq 3 such that we can divide a convex nn-polygon into triangles by using some diagonals of this polygon such that the number of the used diagonals of every vertex is even.

Solution

The answer is 3n3 \mid n.

1) We show that if n=3kn=3k then we can divide every convex nn-polygon (without overlapping) into triangles by using some diagonals of this polygon such that the number of the used diagonals of every vertex is an even integer. The proof is by induction in kk. The figure shows how to reduce from 3(k+1)3(k+1)-polygon to 3k3k-polygon.

Figure 1

Figure 2

2) We show that if a convex nn-polygon can divide (non-overlap) a convex nn-polygon into triangles by using some diagonals of this polygon such that the number of the used diagonals of every vertex is an even integer, then 3n3 \mid n.

First note that the number of triangles is exact n2n-2 using the sum of the angles (this sum is π×(n2)\pi \times (n-2) in any convex nn-polygon). Thus, the number of used diagonals is n3n-3 (by adding all the numbers of sides of the n2n-2 triangles we get 3(n2)=n+2×3(n-2)=n+2 \times number of diagonals). Now, we can color the triangles with white and black in such a way that: One side of the nn-polygon is black and no adjacent (having one side in common) triangles have the same color.

Since the diagonals of each vertex is even, we easily see that all sides of the nn-polygon are black. Let xx denote the number of the black triangles, the sum of the sides of all black triangles is
3x=n+(n3)3n. 3x = n + (n-3) \Rightarrow 3 \mid n.
\square

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