Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / Belarusian Mathematical Olympiad /65 of 208

Belarusian Mathematical Olympiad

Combinatorics Difficulty 5.7 AIME, harder Prove it Belarus

In the Paircity there are n≥2n \ge 2 married couples numbered from 11 to nn. On the New Year's eve, each man congratulated two women from couples whose numbers differ by one. It turned out that for any two men from couples whose numbers differ by one, there is a woman who received congratulations from both of them.

Prove that at least one man congratulated his wife.

Solution

Call a man leftside if he congratulated women from couples with numbers less than his own, otherwise call him rightside. Clearly, the man from the first couple is leftside and the man from the nn-th couple is rightside. Hence, there is a number ii, 1≤i<n−11 \le i < n - 1, such that the man from the ii-th couple is leftside while the man from the (i+1)(i+1)-th couple is leftside. The numbers of couples of these men differ by one, but they congratulated four different women — a contradiction to the problem condition. Consequently, at least one man congratulated his wife.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,604 problems in a working order, from Junior Challenge level to the IMO shortlist.

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