Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.0 AIME, harder Prove it Slovenia

The sides and one of the diagonals of a rhombus measure 6060 cm. Inside the rhombus there are 99 points. Do there exist two of the points which are not more than 3030 cm apart? Justify your answer.

Solution

The answer is yes. The shorter diagonal divides the rhombus into two equilateral triangles with the sides of length 6060 cm. Each of the two triangles can be further divided into 44 equilateral triangles with the sides of length 3030 cm. We have thus divided the rhombus into 88 equilateral triangles with the sides measuring 3030 cm. Since there are 99 points inside the rhombus, at least one of these equilateral triangles must contain at least two points. Let us prove that two points contained in the same triangle are at most 3030 cm apart. Denote the points by EE and FF and denote the vertices of the equilateral triangle containing them by AA, BB and CC. Consider the triangle AEFAEF. The inner angle at AA measures 6060^\circ or less, so one of the remaining two angles must measure at least 6060^\circ. From here we conclude that EFEF is not the longest side in the triangle AEFAEF. The other two sides measure at most 3030 cm since the points EE and FF lie inside a circle centered at AA with radius 3030 cm. Thus, the distance between EE and FF is at most 3030 cm.

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