Maths Olympiad Prep

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Problem 643

AMC 10/12, early questions
Combinatorics Difficulty 3.8 Find the answer South-Afrika · South Africa · 2011

A little boy Mak has drawn a rectangle of size 20×1520 \times 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.

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Official solution

Consider a square of side length dd, and the position of its bottom-right unit square. It has d1d-1 squares above, and d1d-1 squares to the left of it. Hence there are (21d)(16d)(21-d)(16-d) possibilities for the bottom-right corner, resulting in (21d)(16d)(21-d)(16-d) squares of size dd appearing in the grid. The total number of squares is
S=d=115(21d)(16d)=d=115(33637d+d2)=1533637d=115d+d=115d2=153363715162+1516316=1840. \begin{aligned} S &= \sum_{d=1}^{15} (21 - d)(16 - d) \\ &= \sum_{d=1}^{15} (336 - 37d + d^2) \\ &= 15 \cdot 336 - 37 \sum_{d=1}^{15} d + \sum_{d=1}^{15} d^2 \\ &= 15 \cdot 336 - 37 \frac{15 \cdot 16}{2} + \frac{15 \cdot 16 \cdot 31}{6} \\ &= 1840. \end{aligned}

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