How many functions satisfy the property that for all values of and such that .
HMMT November
Solution
To construct such a function , we just need to choose a value for from for each . But the condition that whenever means that This means that once we have chosen , and , the five remaining values of , and are already determined. The answer is therefore just the number of ways to choose these first five values. Since there are 10 possibilities for each one, we get that the answer is .
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