Handshake Problem

Author: Chandrahas Halai

In a gathering, people are shaking hands with other people as per their choice.
They may not shake hands with some people (who are not known to them or
whom they don’t like) if they so wish. They can shake hands with the same
person only once (repeated handshakes with the same person are not
counted).
A point to be noted here is that all the persons in the gathering are not going
to shake hands with everyone else.
Also they have to shake hands with at least one person in the gathering. (If a
person doesn’t shake hands with anyone he can’t be considered a part of the
gathering as it is.)
In such a gathering there are at least two persons who have shaken hands for
the same number of times. Can we prove this?

The proof:
Let there be ‘n’ number of persons at the gathering. And let us begin with the
assumption that all the persons at the said gathering have shaken hands with
different number of people.

In a gathering of n persons, a person can shake hands with maximum n-1

persons. That is he shakes hands with all the persons in the gathering except
himself of course.

Let us list out the number of handshakes by all the persons in the gathering:
The 1st person shakes hands with (n-1) persons.
The 2nd person shakes hands with (n-2) persons
The 3rd person shakes hands with (n-3) persons
The 4th person shakes hands with (n-4) persons
So on and so forth we can say that
The (n-2)nd person shakes hands with 2 persons
The (n-1)st person shakes hands with only 1 person
And
The nth or the last person does not shake hands with anyone.
But how can this happen???
The first person has shaken hands with everyone at the gathering. Hence the
last or the nth person has to have shaken hands with at least one person.
Hence our assumption that everyone has shaken hands for different number of
times is wrong.
Hence we can conclude that there will be at least two persons in the gathering
who have shaken hands for the same number of times.