1971 IMO Problems/Problem 5
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[hide]Problem
Prove that for every natural number ; there exists a finite set of points in a plane with the following property: For every point in ; there are exactly points in which are at unit distance from .
Solution 1
I shall prove a more general statement about the unit distance graph(, adjacency iff the Euclidean distance between the points is ) and this will follow as a consequence. if occur as unit distance graphs, then so does ( here is described as or ). this is seen by describing the vertices by complex numbers. suppose there is an embedding of by the complex numbers and for by the numbers . we claim that for some choice of , will do the job(a suitable rotation). what we need is that iff either or . clearly if the condition holds then the adjacency is satisfied. suppose and that the corresponding complex numbers are at a distance from one another. Then this gives a quadratic in and hence can take only finitely many values here.ruling this out for each such set of hence rules out finitely many values of and therefore a suitable choice exists. for the given problem we need a unit distance graph which is regular of degree for any given . since we can form the graph , we can form (the unit cube) and that solves the problem.
This solution was posted and copyrighted by seshadri. The original thread for this problem can be found here: [1]
Solution 2
Suppose has the formwhere is unknown set of distinct unit vectors in . We can build inductively, starting from the empty set and adding vectors to it, one by one. We just need to make sure that two thing are respected: 1. All vectors in are distinct; 2. Two vector sums are at unit distance from one another if and only if they differ in presence of exactly one summand (i.e. one and only one coefficient in the sum changes from to ). If these two conditions are kept, then each of points at will be at unit distance from exactly points corresponding to sums at which one and only one of coefficients differs from coefficients of this point. However, respecting these conditions is not hard because and for each new vector being added to there is at most some finite set of forbidden endpoints given by sums/differences of already determined vectors but the rest of the (infinite) unit circle is permissible.
This solution was posted and copyrighted by Bandera. The original thread for this problem can be found here: [2]
See Also
1971 IMO (Problems) • Resources | ||
Preceded by Problem 4 |
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 | Followed by Problem 6 |
All IMO Problems and Solutions |