Berkeley Math Circle 2000-2001 Monthly Contest #7 Solutions

1. Show that there exist innitely many natural numbers n with the following property: the sum of all the positive divisors of n, excluding n itself, equals n + 12. Solution: Let p be any prime number greater than 3; we show that n = 6p has the desired property. The positive divisors of 6p = 2 3 p are 1, 2, 3, p, 2 3, 2 p, 3 p, and 2 3 p. The sum of all the factors other than 6p is equal to 6p + 12, as needed. It is well known that there are innitely many prime numbers. Since each value of p gives a dierent value for n = 6p, we obtain innitely many values for n. 2. 5 married couples gather at a party. As they come in and greet each other, various people exchange handshakes but, of course, people never shake hands with themselves or with their own respective spouses. At the end of the party, one woman goes around asking people how many hands they shook, and she gets nine dierent answers. How many hands did she herself shake? Solution: Suppose that there were n couples, and the woman asked all 2n 1 other attendees how many hands they shook and received 2n 1 dierent answers. We will show that she herself shook n 1 hands; hence, in our particular case, the answer is 4. We work by induction. When n = 1, there is one couple, and no handshakes can occur, proving the base case. Now suppose the result holds for n couples; we will prove it is valid for n + 1 couples. With n + 1 couples present, the woman receives 2n + 1 dierent answers to her question. But no person P can shake more than 2n hands (for 2n + 2 people, minus P and P s spouse); hence, these 2n + 1 numbers must be exactly 0, 1, 2, . . . , 2n in some order. In particular, one of these people, A, shook everyone elses hand except As own spouse (that accounts for the 2n answer), and another, B , shook no hands (the 0 answer). Because B did not shake As hand, A and B must be married to each other. The remaining 2n people include the woman who asked the question, together with those who answered 1, 2, . . . , 2n 1 to her question. Now pretend that A and B had not attended the party, so we are left with n couples. Each of these people shook hands with A and not with B ; therefore, when A and B are removed, their handshake counts become 0, 1, 2, . . . , 2n 2. Hence, by the induction hypothesis, the questioner shook n 1 hands. But now, if we put A and B back in, we note that the woman shook As hand as well (and not B s). So, altogether, she shook n hands. This completes the induction step, and now the proof is done. 3. Let ABCD be a square and E a point on side CD. The circle inscribed in triangle ADE touches DE at F , and the circle inside quadrilateral ABCE , tangent to sides AB, BC, EA, touches AB at G. Prove that lines AE, BD, and F G meet in a point. Solution: Extend lines BC and AE to intersect at H . Then the circle inside quadrilateral ABCE , tangent to AB, BC, and EA, is really the inscribed circle of HBA. (Actually, this is only true if the circle lies inside HBA rather than outside it. However, the fact that CE is parallel to AB with CE < CD = AB readily implies that E lies between H and A, and C lies between H and B , so that the whole quadrilateral ABCE lies within HBA, so the circle drawn inside it does too.) Now let P be the intersection point of lines BD and AE . Consider the homothety (scaling) about P that sends point D to point B . Since homotheties preserve directions of lines, this map takes line AD to the line through B and parallel to AD, namely line HB . Similarly, it takes line DE to line BA. And line EA passes through P , the center of the homothety, so it goes to itself. Thus, our homothety takes lines AD, DE, EA to lines HB, BA, AH (= AE ), respectively, so it takes ADE to HBA. Consequently, the incircle of ADE is mapped to the incircle of HBA, and the map also matches corresponding tangency points: F goes to G. But if a homothety about P takes F to G, then P, F, G must be collinear. We now know that P lies on lines AE, BD, and F G, which is what we need.

4. There are 3, 999, 999 cities in Antarctica, and some pairs of them are connected by roads. It is known that, given any two cities, there is a sequence of roads leading from one to the other. Prove that the cities can be divided into 1999 groups (of 2001 cities each) such that, given any two cities in the same group, it is possible to get from one to the other using at most 4000 roads. Solution: First, we provide some relevant graph-theoretic background. Any nite, connected graph can be turned into a tree (a connected graph without cycles) by removing some edges. Proof: If our graph has a cycle, any edge of that cycle can be removed without disconnecting the graph. So remove this edge, leaving a new graph. If it has a cycle, we can again remove an edge; continuing in this manner, we must eventually stop, since there are only nitely many edges to remove. We then have a graph with no cycles; since no edge removal ever disconnected the graph, it must still be connected. Also, given a tree, we can choose a root vertex r. Then, for any vertex v , there is a unique path from v to r, never repeating a vertex (uniqueness follows from the absence of cycles). We call v a descendant of w if this path goes through w. Every vertex is considered to be a descendant of itself and of r. Suppose v is a descendant of w; then the path from v to r consists of the path from v to w followed by the path from w to r. It follows that descent is transitive: if w in turn is a descendant of u, then v is a descendant of u. It also follows that d(v, r) = d(v, w) + d(w, r), where d(x, y ) denotes the distance (i.e. number of edges in the path) from x to y . Finally, a vertex v with no descendants can be removed and the graph will remain connected. Proof: every other vertex is connected to r by a path that does not pass through v , so these vertices will remain connected to r and hence to each other when v is removed. Now we can solve our original problem. We state the graph-theoretic translation: given a connected graph G on kn vertices (k 0, n 1), these vertices can be partitioned into k sets of size n such that d(v, w) 2n 2 whenever v, w are in the same set. (In our case, k = 1999, n = 2001.) We prove this by induction on k . If k = 0, we form no vertex sets, and the statement is vacuously true. Now suppose the statement holds for k 1, where k 1, and we have a graph G on kn vertices. It suces to prove the result when G is a tree, since otherwise we can make it a tree by removing some edges and partition the vertices of this tree appropriately. The same partition will then work for the original graph G, since the distance between two vertices cannot increase when we put the deleted edges back. So suppose G is a tree, and arbitrarily choose a root r. Now let a be a vertex for which d(a, r) is maximal. Let a = v1 , v2 , . . . , vq = r be the path from a to r, and choose the smallest i such that vi has at least n descendants. (Some such i surely exists, since r has kn descendants.) Let S be the set of descendants of vi ; note that if v S , then every descendant of v is in S , by transitivity. Notice that v1 , v2 , . . . , vi1 are all descendants of vi1 , so the minimality of i implies i 1 < n. Thus, d(a, vi ) = i 1 n 1. Now we claim the distance between any two elements of S is at most 2n 2. Indeed, suppose b, c S . We have d(b, vi ) = d(b, r) d(vi , r) d(a, r) d(vi , r) (by choice of a) = d(a, vi ) n 1. Similarly, d(c, vi ) n 1, and so d(b, c) d(b, vi ) + d(vi , c) 2(n 1), as claimed. Now let a1 be an element of S at maximal distance from r. (For example, take a1 = a.) Then a1 can have no descendants (except itself) in G, since if b were a descendant of a1 , we would have d(b, r) = d(a1 , b) + d(a1 , r), contradicting maximality. Thus, we can remove a1 from G to leave a graph G1 , which is still connected in fact, still a tree with root r. Now a similar argument shows that, if a2 S G1 is chosen to have maximal distance from r, then a2 can have no descendants in G1 : any descendant would lie in S , by transitivity, and it would also be farther from r than a2 , violating maximality. So, deleting a2 from G1 gives another rooted tree, G2 . Then, we can choose a3 S G2 to be maximally distant from r, and so forth. We continue removing vertices in this manner; since S has at least n elements, we can remove n vertices. Thus, we choose distinct vertices a1 , a2 , . . . , an , all of which lie in S ; this means that any two of these vertices are at distance 2n 2 from each other, and the remaining graph, G {a1 , . . . , an }, is still a tree. Now using the induction hypothesis, this remaining graph can be partitioned to form the remaining k 1 sets of vertices, and the desired partition of G is accomplished. Remark: In fact, given an arbitrary connected graph with a vertex r selected, we can dene v to be a descendant of w whenever d(v, r) = d(v, w) + d(w, r), and the same solution works, without having to assume the graph is a tree. However, the case of a tree helps to motivate the denition.

5. Let a1 , a2 , a3 , . . . be a sequence of positive integers with the following property: if S is any nonempty set of positive integers, there exists s S with as gcd(S ). Prove that n! is divisible by a1 a2 an for every positive integer n. Solution: Fix n. Arrange the integers a1 , . . . , an in nonincreasing order, ai1 ai2 ain . We claim there exists a bijective function f : {1, 2, . . . , n} {1, 2, . . . , n} such that aik | f (k ) for each k = 1, 2, . . . , n. To demonstrate this, we construct f inductively. Suppose that f (k ) has been dened for all values of k less than some j , and we wish to dene f (j ). Let d be the greatest common divisor of i1 , i2 , . . . , ij . By the hypothesis, there exists some i {i1 , i2 , . . . , ij } such that ai d; since aij = min{ai1 , ai2 , . . . , aij }, we have aij ai d. Now, we know of j distinct multiples of d lying in the set {1, 2, . . . , n} (namely, i1 , i2 , . . . , ij ); this many multiples can only exist if jd n. Then, the numbers aij , 2aij , . . . , jaij are also all in {1, 2, . . . , n}, since jaij jd n. At most j 1 of these can have been used up by the previously dened values f (1), f (2), . . . , f (j 1), so some value is left over; we dene f (j ) to be such a value. Then aij | f (j ), as required. So we can recursively dene f (1), f (2), . . . , f (n) by the above method, and our construction ensures that f is injective. Since it maps the nite set {1, 2, . . . , n} to itself, it must actually be bijective. Since aik | f (k ) for each k , we have a1 a2 an = ai1 ai2 ain | f (1)f (2) f (n) = 1 2 n = n!. Remark: In fact, n! is the smallest positive integer that necessarily satises this condition. Indeed, if p is any prime, then we can dene an to be the largest power of p dividing n, for each n, and this produces a sequence meeting the condition of the problem statement. Then a1 a2 an is the highest power of p dividing n!, so taking the least common multiple of these values over all choices of p gives us n!.

Solutions c 2001, Berkeley Math Circle.