Combinatorics Problems, Part 1
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1. Show that + +⋯+ = .
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2. Find a nice formulation for the sum + + ⋯+ .
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3. Let = + + ⋯+ 2 . Show that = .
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2
4. Given = {1 , 2 , ⋯ , }, How many unordered pairs { , } are there where and are nonempty
subsets of with ∩ = ∅.
5. Do there exist 10,000 10-digit numbers which are all divisible by 7 and are all rearrangements of
the same digits.
6. A person has a coat of area 1 composed of five possibly overlapping patches. The area of each
patch is at least . Prove that there are two patches whose overlap has area of at least .
7. A permutation of elements is a one-to-one function : {1 , 2 , ⋯ , } → {1 , 2 , ⋯ , }. A
permutation of {1 , 2 , 3 , ⋯ , 2 } has property if | ( ) − ( + 1)| = for at least one .
Show that for any ∈ ℤ, there are more permutations with property that without it.
8. Let be a set of ≥ 4 points in the plane, no three of which are collinear. Initially these points
are connected with segments so that each point in is the endpoint of exactly two segments.
Then, we perform moves where we choose two segments and that intersect and replace
them by the segments and if none of them is present.
Prove that it is impossible to perform moves.
Combinatorics Problem Set Part 2
1. On some planet, there are 2 countries ( ≥ 4). Each country has a flag units wide and one
unit high composed of fields of size 1×1, each field being either yellow or blue. No two
countries have the same flag.
We say that a set of flags is diverse if these flags can be arranged into an × square so that
all fields on its main diagonal will have the same color. Determine the smallest positive integer
such that among any distinct flags, there exist flags forming a diverse set.
2. Six stacks , … , of coins are standing in a row. In the beginning every stack contains a single
coin. There are two types of allowed moves:
Move 1 : If stack with 1 ≤ ≤ 5 contains at least one coin, you may remove one coin
from and add two coins to .
Move 2 : If stack with 1 ≤ ≤ 4 contains at least one coin, then you may remove one
coin from and exchange stacks and .
Decide whether it is possible to achieve by a sequence of such moves that the first five
stacks are empty, whereas the sixth stack contains exactly 2016 coins.
3. Players A and B play a paintful game on the real line. Player A has a pot of paint with four units of
black ink. A quantity of this ink suffices to blacken a (closed) interval of length . In every round,
player A picks some positive integer m and provides units of ink from the pot. Player B then
picks an integer and blackens the interval from to (some parts of this interval may have
been blackened before). The goal of player A is to reach a situation where the pot is empty and
the interval [0,1] is not completely blackened. Decide whether there exists a strategy for player
A to win in a finite number of moves.
4. Let n be a positive integer. Each point ( , ) in the plane, where and are non-negative integers
with + < , is colored red or blue, subject to the following condition:
If a point ( , ) is red, then so are all points ( ′, ′) with ≤ and ′ ≤ .
Let be the number of ways to choose blue points with distinct -coordinates, and let be the
number of ways to choose n blue points with distinct -coordinates. Prove that = .
5. An -term sequence ( , , . . . , ) in which each term is either 0 or 1 is called a binary sequence
of length . Let be the number of binary sequences of length containing no three consecutive
terms equal to 0, 1, 0 in that order. Let be the number of binary sequences of length that
contain no four consecutive terms equal to 0, 0, 1, 1 or 1, 1, 0, 0 in that order. Prove that
= 2 for all positive integers .
6. Let ≥ 2 be an integer. Consider an × chessboard divided into unit squares. We call a
configuration of rooks on this board happy if every row and every column contains exactly one
rook. Find the greatest positive integer k such that for every happy configuration of rooks, we can
find a × square without a rook on any of its unit squares.
