Given two positive integers and . In the plane, there are circles () such that each circle intersects every other circle at two points, and all these intersection points are pairwise distinct.
Each intersection point is colored with one of colors such that each color is used at least once and on each of the circles, the same number of colors is represented.
Determine all values of and for which such a coloring is possible.
Solution
The answer is: or .
Obviously, according to the problem statement, and , because for all points would have the same color, while the number of colors should be . We number the circles and the colors from 1 to n and denote by the set of colors of the intersection points of circles i and j. contains one or two elements.
Let . For , is an allowed coloring. For , , is an example of an allowed coloring. Now let . To each of the n circles, we assign the set of the two colors appearing on it. Each of these sets consists of two elements, and each of the n colors must appear in at least two sets, since each colored point is the intersection of two circles. Therefore, each color appears in exactly two sets. For the circle 1 with the set , there are thus at most two other circles whose color sets contain i or j. Since , we always find a circle 2 with the set and . The intersection points of circles 1 and 2 are then not allowed to be colored, contradiction!
Now we prove by induction a slightly stronger statement than required: For , there always exists an allowed coloring in which the color i appears on the circle i for all . For the base case, we give an example for with , and for the following example of an allowed coloring with the additional condition:
for and for the remaining pairs with .
Now assume that the stronger statement is true for some , and choose . Since , there exists an allowed coloring with the additional condition for the circles or colors 1,2,..., n-1. Now we color the intersection points of circle n: For each , one intersection point of circles i and n is colored with color n. Thus, on each of the circles i with , exactly colors appear; among them i and . For , the second intersection point of circles i and n is colored with color i, so that now also on circle exactly colors lie, namely 1 to and . All other new intersection points are colored with color n, so that no additional colors appear on any circle. This coloring satisfies all conditions.