How many ways, without taking order into consideration, can 2002 be expressed as the sum of 3 positive integers (for instance, and are considered to be the same way)?
Solution
Call the three numbers that sum to , and . In order to prevent redundancy, we will consider only cases where . Then can range from 1 to 667, inclusive. For odd , there are possible values for . For each choice of and , there can only be one possible , since the three numbers must add up to a fixed value. We can add up this arithmetic progression to find that there are 167167 possible combinations of , for odd . For each even , there are possible values for . Therefore, there are 166833 possible combinations for even . In total, this makes 334000 possibilities.
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