Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /24 of 105

Combinatorics Difficulty 5.2 AIME, harder Prove it JBMO

Problem:

2015 points are given in a plane such that from any five points we can choose two points with distance less than 1 unit. Prove that 504 of the given points lie on a unit disc.

Solution

Solution:

Start from an arbitrary point AA and draw a unit disc with center AA. If all other points belong to this disc then we are done. Otherwise, take any point BB outside of the disc. Draw a unit disc with center BB. If two drawn discs cover all 2015 points, by the pigeonhole principle (PHP), one of the discs contains at least 1008 points.

Suppose that there is a point CC outside of the two drawn discs. Draw a unit disc with center CC. If three drawn discs cover all 2015 points, by PHP, one of the discs contains at least 672 points.

Finally, if there is a point DD outside of the three drawn discs, draw a unit disc with center DD. By the given condition, any other point belongs to one of the four drawn discs. By PHP, one of the discs contains at least 504 points, concluding the solution.

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 reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.