There are points on a circle, arbitrarily numbered , with each number assigned to exactly one point. Prove that one can draw 500 pairwise disjoint chords among these points such that the two endpoints of each chord have the same sum.
Solution
The proof of this problem is based on the following fact.
Lemma. In a graph , let the degree of vertex be . Then contains an independent set consisting of some vertices satisfying , where
Proof. We proceed by induction on the number of vertices of . The base case clearly holds. In the inductive step, take a vertex in with the minimum degree . Delete together with all its neighbors , as well as all edges connected to these vertices, from the graph , and call the resulting graph . By the induction hypothesis, contains an independent set of vertices satisfying . Since none of the vertices in are neighbors of , is an independent set of vertices in .
Let the degree of vertex in be . Clearly holds for every vertex , and by the choice of , holds for all . Thus we have
Hence . Therefore the lemma holds by mathematical induction.
We return to the proof of the problem. For simplicity, let , and draw all the chords determined by the points on the circle. Color each chord according to the sum of the numbers at its two endpoints, which is one of (think of each of as a color). Two different chords sharing a common endpoint must have different colors. For each color , consider the following graph : its vertices are all the chords of color ; two chords are neighbors if and only if they intersect. Let be the quantity defined by the formula in the lemma above.
Each chord divides the circle into two arcs, at least one of which contains of the given points. (Special case: if the two endpoints of are adjacent, then .) For each , there are chords satisfying . Such a chord has degree at most in the graph of its color, for the reason that if are all the points on the arc determined by the chord with and color , then each point is the endpoint of at most one chord of color , for ; hence at most chords of color intersect .
From this it follows that for each , the chords satisfying contribute at least to the sum . Summing from up to gives
Since there are a total of colors, taking the average shows that there is at least one color satisfying
By the lemma above, there exist at least pairwise disjoint chords of color ; the sums of the numbers at the two endpoints of these chords are, of course, all equal to . Finally, it only remains to verify that when , . We have
This proves the problem.