Lecture 1: Double Counting

December 12
Lecturer: Shourya Pandey Scribe: Shourya Pandey

Introduction
A good fraction of combinatorial problems deal with simply counting some set of objects in two
different ways. We look at some such problems today.

Simple Problems
Question 1. There are n people and m committees. Each person belongs to exactly 10 committees,
and each committee has exactly 5 members. What is the relation between m and n?

Solution. We claim m = 2n.

Consider the set
S := {(p, c) : person p is a member of committee c}
Let us evaluate |S| in two ways. If we fix a p, then there are 10 committees c such that
(p, c) ∈ S. Therefore |S| = 10n. On the other hand, if we fix a committee c, then there are 5
people p such that (p, c) ∈ S. Therefore |S| = 5m. This finishes the proof.

Often, the difficult part of the question is to find the set S to be double counted.

Question 2. 15 students enroll themselves for the summer camp. Every day, exactly 3 students get
cleaning duty. After the camp, it was found that every pair of students had been on duty together
exactly once. How long was the summer camp?

Question 3. A school has 2019 boys and 2019 girls. There are several clubs in the school. No
student can join more than 100 clubs in the school. It is also known that any two students of the
opposite gender have at least one club in common. Prove that there exists a club with at least 11
boys and at least 11 girls.

Question 4. Let pn (k) be the number of permutations of n elements that have exactly k fixed
points. Show that
∑n
(k − 1)pn (k) = 0
k=0
∑n
Bonus: Can you compute k=0 k · pn (k)?
2

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Medium Level Problems
Question 5. Consider a simple undirected graph G on n vertices and m edges, such that G has no
cycle of length four. Show that
n( √ )
m≤ 1 + 4n − 3
4
Solution. Consider the set
S := {({u, v}, w) : u, v, w are distinct vertices such that w is adjacent to both u and v}
The motivation for choosing such an S is that for any pair of distinct vertices u, v, there can be
at most one w such that w is adjacent to both u and v.
Let us calculate |S| in two ways. If we fix the set {u, v}, there is at most one w for which
({u, v}, w) ∈ S. This means ( )
n
|S| ≤
2
( )
Let us fix w instead. If the degree of w is dw , then there are d2w pairs of neighbours of w. This
∑ (dw ) 2m2
means
|S| = ≥ −m
w
2 n
This means
2m2 n(n − 1)
−m≤
n 2
which gives the desired inequality. Note that for n = 91, we get m ≤ 455. Does this remind you
of some problem?

Question 6. Prove that a simple undirected graph G on n vertices and m edges has at least
m(4m − n2 )
3n
triangles.

Question 7. In a competition, there are m contestants and n judges, where n ≥ 3 and n is odd.
Each judge rates each contestant as either pass or fail. Suppose k is a number such that the ratings
of each pair of judges coincides for at most k contestants. Show that
m(n − 1)
k≥
2n
holds.

Question 8. Let there be a set S n ≥ 2 points in the plane such that no three points of S are
collinear. Suppose k is an integer such that for any point P in S, there exists a subset XP of S with
cardinality at least k, such that P is equidistant to all vertices in XP . Show that
√ 1
k < 2n +
2

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Harder Problems
Question 9. Let n be an even positive integer, and let G be a simple undirected graph with exactly
n2
edges. An unordered pair of distinct vertices {u, v} is said to be "close" if they have a common
4 ( )
neighbor. Show that the number of "close" pairs is at least 2 n/2
2
.

Question 10. A school has n students. Each student can participate in any number of classes
that he wants. Every class has at least two students participating in it, and if two different classes
have at least two common students, then the number of students in these two classes is different.
Prove that the number of classes is not greater than (n − 1)2 . Is this bound tight?

Question 11. This is one of my favourite problems from the ISLs. There are 10001 students
in a university. Some students join together to form several clubs (a student may belong to dif-
ferent clubs). Some clubs join together to form several societies (a club may belong to different
societies). There are k societies in all. The following conditions hold:

1. Each pair of students belongs to exactly one club.

2. For each student and each society, there exists exactly one club such that the student belongs
to the club and the club belongs to the society.

3. Each club has an odd number of students. In addition, a club with 2m + 1 students is in
exactly m societies (m ≥ 0).

Prove that k = 5000, and that such a formation of clubs and societies is possible.

Weighted Double Counting

∑
∑ let f : S → C be a function. Instead of simple counting |S| = s∈S 1, we can
Let S be a set, and
count f (S) := s∈S f (s) as well. This is what is called weighted counting; the weight of s is f (s).

Let us see one cool application of weighted double-counting.

Question 12. Consider a complete graph G on n ≥ 6 vertices. Each edge in this graph is coloured
either red or blue. Find the least number of monochromatic triangles G has, in terms of n.
Solution. Consider the set

S = {(u, v, w) : u, v, w are distinct vertices }

We consider f : S → {1, −1/2} as follows. If the edges uv and vw have the same colour, then
f ((u, v, w)) = 1, otherwise f ((u, v, w)) = −1
2
.

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Why did we do this? Consider a monochromatic triangle uvw in the graph G. The vertices u, v, w
occur in 6 different permutations in S: (u, v, w), (u, w, v), etc. For each such triple t, we have
f (t) = 1. Therefore, a monochromatic triangle has a "contribution" of 6 to f (S).
Consider a non-monochromatic triangle uvw instead. Let uv and vw be red and let uw be blue, for
now. Then, f ((u, v, w))+f ((u, w, v))+f ((v, u, w))+f ((v, w, u))+f ((w, u, v))+f ((w, v, u)) =
1 + −1/2 + −1/2 + −1/2 + −1/2 + 1 = 0. This means, non-monochromatic triangles contribute
nothing to f (S).

This is great news, as this means f (S) = 6M , where M is the number of monochromatic tri-
angles. The only thing left to do is to calculate f (S) in another way.

Fix the vertex v. Let the number of red edges incident on v be r, and the number of blue edges
incident of v be b. Then, it is not hard to see that

∑ −1
f (u, v, w) = r(r − 1) + b(b − 1) + · 2rb
u,w are distinct vertices that are also distinct from v
2
= r2 − r + (n − 1 − r)(n − 2 − r) − r(n − 1 − r)
( )2
n−1 (n − 1)(n − 5)
=3 r− +
2 4

The minimum value is either (n−1)(n−5)4

or (n−2)(n−4)
4
, depending on whether n is odd or even. In
n(n−1)(n−5) n(n−2)(n−4)
all, G has at least 24
or 24
monochromatic triangles, depending or whether n is
odd or even. It is not difficult to construct graphs for which equality holds.

Question 13. In a rectangular array of non-negative reals with m rows and n columns, each row
and each column contains at least one positive element. Moreover, if a row and a column intersect
at a positive element, then the sums of their elements are the same. Prove that m = n.

Question 14. Let S1 , S2 , · · · , Sm be distinct subsets of {1, 2, · · · , n} such that |Si ∩ Sj | = 1

for all i ̸= j. Prove that m ≤ n.

Question 15. In the place called Duma, there are 1600 delegates, who have formed 16000 commit-
tees of 80 people each. Prove that one can find two committees having no fewer than four common
members.