Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.3 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

A simple graph GG on 20202020 vertices has its edges colored red and green. It turns out that any monochromatic cycle has even length. Given this information, what is the maximum number of edges GG could have?

Solution

Solution:

Note that GG has no K5K_{5}; indeed, it's well-known that the only triangle-free coloring of the edges of K5K_{5} consists of two monochromatic 55-cycles. Therefore, the number of edges of GG is at most (42)5052=1530150\binom{4}{2} \cdot 505^{2} = 1530150 by Turán's theorem.

To show this occurs, we split the graph into four equally sized components A,B,C,DA, B, C, D. We color red all edges between AA and BB, or CC and DD. We color green all edges between AA and CC, AA and DD, BB and CC, and BB and DD. This indeed has the claimed number of edges, and the subgraphs formed by each color are bipartite, so this solves the problem.

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