Maths Olympiad Prep

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, 2010

Combinatorics Difficulty 7.8 National Olympiad, round 2 Prove it United States

Let TT be a finite set of positive integers greater than 11. A subset SS of TT is called good, if for every tTt \in T there exists some sSs \in S with gcd(s,t)>1\gcd(s, t) > 1. Prove that the number of good subsets of TT is odd.

Solution

Consider the set A\mathcal{A} of all (ordered) pairs (X,Y)(X, Y) with X,YTX, Y \subseteq T and gcd(x,y)=1\gcd(x, y) = 1 for all xXx \in X and yYy \in Y. Clearly XX and YY are disjoint for any (X,Y)A(X, Y) \in \mathcal{A}. We have the following claims.

i. If XX' is good, then the number of pairs (X,Y)A(X', Y) \in \mathcal{A} is odd: In fact, in this case the only such pair in A\mathcal{A} is (X,)(X', \emptyset).

ii. If XX' is not good, then the number of pairs (X,Y)A(X', Y) \in \mathcal{A} is even: Let ZTXZ \subseteq T \setminus X' contain the numbers that are relatively prime to all numbers in XX'. Because XX' is not good, ZZ is non-empty. Now, note that (X,Y)A(X', Y) \in \mathcal{A} if and only if YZY \subseteq Z, hence the number of choices for YY is a power of 22.

Finally, note that (,)(\emptyset, \emptyset) is the only element of A\mathcal{A} of the form (X,X)(X, X), hence (X,Y)(Y,X)(X, Y) \mapsto (Y, X) groups the elements of A{(,)}\mathcal{A} \setminus \{(\emptyset, \emptyset)\} into pairs. Thus, A\mathcal{A} has an odd number of elements. By (i) and (ii), this implies that the number of good subsets is odd, completing the proof.

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