Annual Chris Nash

Mathematics Competition
Saturday, March 25, 2023

Name:

J-Number:

E-Mail:

Major:

Enrolled in Fall?

P
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
/5 /5 /5 /5 /10 /10 /10 /10 /10 /70

Have fun!

Instructions
• You have 2 hours.
• No calculators, devices or other help of any kind are permitted.
• Show all your work.
• The problems are not necessarily of comparable difficulty.
Problems 1-4 are worth 5 points each, the remaining problems 10 points each.
• Don’t worry about solving all problems. The winner usually doesn’t.

1
“Warm-up” Problem 1. Pick a number between 1 and 100, and write it in the box below.

The contestant whose number is closest to half of the average of all picked numbers, wins a
small extra prize.
Four people are playing this game. One of the four has just started taken Mind-Reading Theory I
(MITH 125) at South. Using her skills, she knows that the other three will all pick the same
number (but she does not know which). What number should she pick? Why?

“Warm-up” Problem 2. Without a calculator, decide which of 21/2 and 31/3 is the larger
number. Make sure to show your reasoning!

“Warm-up” Problem 3. For his upcoming birthday, Tobias wants to make a rectangular
invitation card with the property that, when folded in half, it has the same aspect ratio (in other
words, the ratio of longer side to shorter side should be as it was before).
(a) Determine the aspect ratio needed for a card with this property.
(b) Suppose Tobias folds in one corner of such a card as shown in the sketch
What is the ratio y/x?

y
x

“Warm-up” Problem 4. The following are three magic squares because the sum of each row,
column and each of the two diagonals is 2.
1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1
0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0
A= , B= , C=
0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1
1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0
By taking combinations of the three magic squares, we can create new ones. For instance,
2A + B + 3C is the magic square D:
6 2 0 4 7 6
1 3 5 3 5
D= , E=
3 1 3 5 3
2 6 4 0
The magic square E was similarly produced from A, B and C. Determine its missing entries.

Problem 5. Suppose that a phone number is a seven digit number that follows these rules:
• The first digit must be between 2 and 9; the other digits may be any value 0-9.
• At least one digit must be repeated.
How many different phone numbers exist?

2
Problem 6. Our goal is to fill digits into the empty cells of the following addition problem to
make it valid.
3 3 3 3 3
+

=
(a) Find a way to fill each of the digits 1 to 9 into the nine empty cells, using each digit
exactly once.
(b) How many such ways are there?
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Problem 7. A rectangular piece of paper is folded in half five times (by placing one side on
top of the opposite side). Each folding can be done along either the short or long side.
Suppose we cut off all four corners of the resulting folded stack, and then unfold the paper.
Determine all possibilities for how many holes the unfolded paper can have.
Note. Something like a missing corner does not count as a hole.

Problem 8. Ben is jumping up a flight of stairs that has 10 steps. He can take one step, two
steps or three steps in a single jump.
(a) Find the number of ways he can jump up the stairs.
(b) Suppose that the third step is so dirty that Ben won’t jump onto it (for instance, his
first jump will not be a three step jump). Find the number of ways he can jump up the
stairs in that scenario.

Problem 9. A maze is modeled after the graph depicted below.

Suppose that there is a door in the center of each edge and that this door is the only way to
cross each edge.
(a) Starting at any point (either inside or outside the maze), is there a path we can take
such that we pass through each door exactly twice? (If your answer is no, then make
sure to explain why. Otherwise, sketch your path.)
(b) What about such a path passing through each door exactly once?