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Combinatorics Difficulty 7.2 National Olympiad, round 2 Prove it Hong Kong

Let n3n \ge 3 be an integer. In a conference there are nn mathematicians. Every pair of mathematicians communicate in one of the nn official languages of the conference. For any three different official languages, there exist three mathematicians who communicate with each other in these three languages. Determine all nn for which this is possible. Justify your claim.

Solution

nn can be any odd integer larger than 11.

We use terminologies in graph theory. We need to colour all edges of the complete graph of nn vertices in nn colours C1,C2,,CnC_1, C_2, \dots, C_n such that for any three distinct colours, there exists a triangle whose edges are of these three colours.

Note that there are (n3)\binom{n}{3} triangles as well as (n3)\binom{n}{3} triples of colours. Therefore, the triangles and the triples of colours are in one-to-one correspondence.

For each colour CjC_j, there are (n12)\binom{n-1}{2} triples of colours consisting of CjC_j since we need to choose two more colours from the remaining n1n-1 colours. On the other hand, for every edge of colour CjC_j, there are n2n-2 triangles containing this edge since we need to choose one more vertex from the remaining n2n-2 vertices. Therefore, there are exactly
1n2(n12)=n12 \frac{1}{n-2} \binom{n-1}{2} = \frac{n-1}{2}
edges of colour CjC_j. This implies nn must be odd.

We now provide a colouring for odd nn. For any vertices ViV_i and VjV_j, we use colour CrC_r to colour the edge joining them where ri+j(modn)r \equiv i + j \pmod{n}. It suffices to show that for any distinct triples r1,r2,r3r_1, r_2, r_3, the system
{i+jr1(modn),j+kr2(modn),k+ir3(modn) \begin{cases} i + j \equiv r_1 \pmod{n}, \\ j + k \equiv r_2 \pmod{n}, \\ k + i \equiv r_3 \pmod{n} \end{cases}
has a unique solution in i,j,k(modn)i, j, k \pmod{n} such that i,j,ki, j, k are pairwise incongruent modulo nn. Indeed, we readily find that
i21((i+j)(j+k)+(k+i))21(r1r2+r3)(modn), i \equiv 2^{-1}((i + j) - (j + k) + (k + i)) \equiv 2^{-1}(r_1 - r_2 + r_3) \pmod{n},
and similarly j21(r1+r2r3)(modn)j \equiv 2^{-1}(r_1 + r_2 - r_3) \pmod{n} and k21(r1+r2+r3)(modn)k \equiv 2^{-1}(-r_1 + r_2 + r_3) \pmod{n}. These are incongruent because r1,r2,r3r_1, r_2, r_3 are incongruent modulo nn. This completes the proof.

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