Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.1 AIME, harder Find the answer

Example 3. Divide each side of a triangle into nn equal parts, and connect the points of division with line segments parallel to each side. How many parallelograms can be formed in the triangle?

A number or a short expression. Fractions can be typed as 3/2, and spacing doesn't matter.

Solution

Solve: First, consider parallelograms whose sides are not parallel to side BCBC. Extend the sides of these parallelograms, and they will intersect with side BCBC. Therefore, these parallelograms correspond to four points or three points on side BCBC (one vertex is on BCBC). Extend sides ABAB and ACAC by 1n\frac{1}{n}, to get ABC\triangle AB'C'. Thus, the parallelograms inside ABC\triangle ABC with sides not parallel to BCBC correspond to four points on BCB'C'.

Conversely, for any four points on BCB'C', draw lines parallel to ABAB' through the first two points (closer to BB') and lines parallel to ACAC' through the last two points (closer to CC'). These lines intersect to form a unique parallelogram.

Thus, we can establish a correspondence: any parallelogram with sides not parallel to BCBC corresponds to four points on BCB'C', and the correspondence rule is:
in the set {1,2,,n+2}\{1,2, \cdots, n+2\}, a four-element ordered tuple.

The number of parallelograms is Cn+24C_{n+2}^{4}.
Therefore, the total number of parallelograms is 3Cn+243 C_{n+2}^{4}.

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Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.