Let be a positive integer and let be an cube. A box is a subset of of one of the forms , or . Each cell of is coloured one of several many colours. Consider the colour set of each box (each colour listed once). There are such, split into three -element collections, one for each of the three directions. It turns out that every colour set in any of the three collections appears in each of the other two collections. Under these conditions, determine, in terms of , the maximum number of colours may bear.
Solution
The required maximum is and is achieved, for instance, by colouring cells as described below. For each colour, we list the set of all cells bearing that colour:
* singletons of the form , where ;
* doubletons of the form , and , where ; and
* triplets of the form , where or .
Thus, bears exactly colours, and it is easily seen that the rank boxes in the three directions all share the same colour set.
We will now show that, under the conditions in the statement, the number of colours bears does not exceed .
Fix such a colouring and split the set of all colours in into three subsets: The set of all colours that appear exactly once, the set of all colours that appear exactly twice, and the set of all colours that appear at least thrice. Let be set of all cells in bearing a colour in . Since ,
and it is therefore sufficient to show that .
To this end, we fix a box of the form and prove that . Summing over all such boxes , we get the desired upper bound. Let and be and boxes, respectively, sharing the colour set of .
If is non-empty, then a cell in this set also lies in both and , hence in . Consequently, and .
Consider now the cells in . There are at most such in the cross , since the cell in is in . Let now be any other cell in . Recall that there is only one other cell in sharing the colour of . Since does not contain , and and each contains a cell sharing its colour, it follows that they both contain . And since the cell in is in , the cell lies in . The assignment is clearly injective, so the number of cells under current consideration does not exceed . Consequently, , and hence .
To deal with the case where is empty, proceed similarly with minor changes. This time contains at most cells from the cross . To any other cell in there corresponds a cell in (not necessarily outside ), so there are at most such. Consequently, , a wee bit better than needed.