Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /3 of 4

, 2024

Combinatorics Difficulty 6.8 National olympiad Prove it Czech Republic

Ten boys and ten girls met at a party. Suppose that every boy likes a different (positive) number of girls and that every girl likes a different (positive) number of boys. Find the largest non-negative integer nn such that it is always possible to form nn disjoint couples of a boy and a girl that like each other.
(Josef Tkadlec)

Solution

We shall prove that the answer is n=1n = 1.

To begin with, note that the problem statement implies that the boys like 1,2,,101, 2, \ldots, 10 girls in some order, so there exists a boy that likes all the girls. Analogously, there must exist a girl that likes all the boys, so putting the two together always yields an admissible couple.

In the second part of the solution, we shall construct a configuration where it's impossible to form more than one such couple. Number the boys and the girls by numbers 1,,101, \ldots, 10 and suppose that the boy ii likes the girl jj if and only if jij \ge i, while the girl jj likes a boy number ii if and only if i=1i = 1 or i>ji > j (see the diagram below for the case i=5i = 5, with boys on top and girls on bottom). With such an assignment, the ii-th boy likes 11i11 - i girls and the jj-th girl likes 11j11 - j boys. Also, it

Figure 1

is clear that the first boy is the only one that can be paired up with a girl that he likes so that she also likes him back, hence it is impossible to form two disjoint admissible couples and we are done.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.

Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.