Let be an integer. In a conference there are mathematicians. Every pair of mathematicians communicate in one of the 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 for which this is possible. Justify your claim.
Solution
can be any odd integer larger than .
We use terminologies in graph theory. We need to colour all edges of the complete graph of vertices in colours such that for any three distinct colours, there exists a triangle whose edges are of these three colours.
Note that there are triangles as well as triples of colours. Therefore, the triangles and the triples of colours are in one-to-one correspondence.
For each colour , there are triples of colours consisting of since we need to choose two more colours from the remaining colours. On the other hand, for every edge of colour , there are triangles containing this edge since we need to choose one more vertex from the remaining vertices. Therefore, there are exactly
edges of colour . This implies must be odd.
We now provide a colouring for odd . For any vertices and , we use colour to colour the edge joining them where . It suffices to show that for any distinct triples , the system
has a unique solution in such that are pairwise incongruent modulo . Indeed, we readily find that
and similarly and . These are incongruent because are incongruent modulo . This completes the proof.