Maths Olympiad Prep

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Number theory Difficulty 5.3 AIME, harder Prove it Argentina

Write in the cells of a 4×44 \times 4 table a different natural number such that the sums by rows are equal and the products by columns are also equal.

Solution

Here is one way to construct such a table. Start by satisfying only the second part of the condition, that the products by columns are equal. This holds for the first table TT below. It has dimensions 4×44 \times 4 and all column products equal 120120. The second table has an additional column in which the row sums of TT are shown.

T=4128325121035564352813226410561980540360900180198019899029749519805506604403301980 T = \begin{array}{c|c|c|c} 4 & 1 & 2 & 8 \\ 3 & 2 & 5 & 1 \\ 2 & 10 & 3 & 5 \\ 5 & 6 & 4 & 3 \end{array} \rightarrow \begin{array}{c|c|c|c|c} 528 & 132 & 264 & 1056 & 1980 \\ 540 & 360 & 900 & 180 & 1980 \\ 198 & 990 & 297 & 495 & 1980 \\ 550 & 660 & 440 & 330 & 1980 \end{array}

Note that the equality of the column products is preserved if a row of TT is multiplied by any number. We use this observation to equalize the different row sums by choosing an appropriate integer for each row. To this end consider the least common multiple 19801980 of the row sums, 1515, 1111, 2020, 1818.

Multiply rows 1, 2, 3, 4 respectively by 198015=132\frac{1980}{15} = 132, 198011=180\frac{1980}{11} = 180, 198020=99\frac{1980}{20} = 99, 198018=110\frac{1980}{18} = 110. The new table has row sums equal to 19801980 and equal column products (their common value is the large number 3104956800031049568000). It remains to observe that all new numbers are different.

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