Senior Quiz Prelims

The Mathematical Crusade 2011 The Mathematical Society, Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram
Complete solutions are required for full credit. Write your answers neatly in separate answer sheets. The rst 9 questions each weigh 10 marks each. The last 3 questions weigh 13 marks each. You have 60 minutes to attempts this paper.

Questions
Q 1. I have four distinct rings that I want to wear on my right hand hand (ve distinct ngers.) One of these rings is a Canadian ring that must be worn on a nger by itself, the rest I can arrange however I want. If I have two or more rings on the same nger, then I consider dierent orders of rings along the same nger to be dierent arrangements. How many dierent ways can I wear the rings on my ngers? Q 2. Suppose there is a 100-storey building, and we are given 2 eggs. We need to nd the highest oor from which an egg can be dropped without breaking it. You also know the following: An egg that survives a fall can be used again. A broken egg must be discarded. The eect of a fall is the same for all eggs. If an egg breaks when dropped, then it would break if dropped from a higher window. If an egg survives a fall then it would survive a shorter fall. It is not ruled out that the rst-oor windows break eggs, nor is it ruled out that the 100th-oor windows do not cause an egg to break. (Question on next page) What is the least number of egg-droppings that is guaranteed to work in all cases? Q 3. Prove that there exists an injective mapping1 from: (a) The set of integers, to the set of naturals2 . (b) The set of the positive rationals to the set of naturals.
1 An injective mapping, also called one-to-one correspondence is a relation f such that f (x) = f (y) = x = y 2 The set of naturals is dened as the set of positive integers (not including zero)

Q 4. I have a pan balance. The pan balance can only tell me when the weights placed on either side are equal. I need to a measure the weight of a bag which I know has an integral weight less than a thousand kilograms.Now, I have to order standard weights to measure this bag. The standard weights all have to be distinct and integral. What is the minimum number of weights that I require? Q 5. Prove that n! + 3 can never be a square for n 4. Q 6. Prove that n n 3 3 is a natural number divisible by 3 for all values of n. Q 7. A and B are playing a game with an empty 2n2n matrix, and in each move, one player adds one number to a position, as per his desire. Player A wins if the matrix formed at the end of the game has a non-zero determinant, while Player B wins if it has determinant zero. Who has the winning strategy and what is it? Q 8. The function f satises f (x) + f (2x + y) + 5xy = f (3x y) + 2x2 + 1 for all real numbers x, y. Determine the value of f (10). Q 9. Prove the A.M. G.M. inequality for 4 variables, i.e. prove the following:
1 a+b+c+d (abcd) 4 4

Q 10. At the second International Congress of Mathematicians, in 1900, a renowned mathematician of that time announced a now famous list of unsolved problems in mathematics, some of which remain unresolved or partially resolved to this day, and greatly shaped the direction of mathematical research well into the 20th century. By what name do we call this list? Q 11. This well known theorem is the undisputed contender for the largest number of proofs in published mathematical literature. One book about this proposition contains 370 proofs by itself. The closest contender to this title is the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity which itself has 200 proofs. What is this infamous theorem? Q 12. The great mathematician Isaac Newton once said I am ashamed to tell you to how many gures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time. What was he talking about?

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