CombinatoricsDifficulty 3.8Find the answerSouth-Afrika · South Africa · 2011
A little boy Mak has drawn a rectangle of size 20×15, and divided it by straight lines into unit squares. How many squares (of any size) are there in Mak's picture?
A number or a short expression. Fractions can be typed as 3/2, and spacing doesn't matter.
Consider a square of side length d, and the position of its bottom-right unit square. It has d−1 squares above, and d−1 squares to the left of it. Hence there are (21−d)(16−d) possibilities for the bottom-right corner, resulting in (21−d)(16−d) squares of size d appearing in the grid. The total number of squares is S=d=1∑15(21−d)(16−d)=d=1∑15(336−37d+d2)=15⋅336−37d=1∑15d+d=1∑15d2=15⋅336−37215⋅16+615⋅16⋅31=1840.
Source: MathNet,
licensed CC-BY-4.0.
Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty, ordering) added by this project.