Problems

Prove that one cannot tile the whole plane with regular pentagons.

Draw the plane tiling using convex hexagons with parallel and equal opposite sides.

Draw how to tile the whole plane with figures, consisting of squares \(1\times 1\), \(2\times 2\), \(3\times 3\), \(4\times 4\), \(5\times 5\), and \(6\times 6\), where each square appears an equal number of times in the design of the figure. Can you think of two essentially different ways to do this?

Find a non-regular octagon which you can use to tile the whole plane and show how to do that.

Mark one card with a \(1\), two cards with a \(2\), ..., fifty cards with a \(50\). Put these \(1+2+...+50=1275\) cards into a box and shuffle them. How many cards do you need to take from the box to be certain that you will have taken at least \(10\) cards with the same mark?

Starting at one of the vertices, an ant wishes to walk each of the \(12\) edges of a sugar cube exactly once. Prove that this is impossible.

Noah has \(10\) dogs, who he wishes to group into \(5\) pairs for \(5\) families, each of whom want two dogs. However, the dogs are quite picky, and can’t be paired with most of the other dogs. None in the first group will go with each other: an alsatian, a border collie, a chihuahua, a dachshund and an English bulldog. None in the second group will go with each other: a foxhound, a greyhound, a harrier, an Irish setter and a Jack Russell. Furthermore,
The alsatian is the least picky and can be paired with any in the second group.

The border collie won’t go with the foxhound, but will go with any other dog in the second group.

The chihuahua and the dachshund will only go with the Irish setter and the Jack Russell.

Additionally, none of the foxhound, greyhound and harrier will go with the English bulldog.
Is it possible to pair up the \(10\) dogs?

\(6\) friends get together for a game of three versus three basketball. In how many ways can they be split into two teams? The order of the two teams doesn’t matter, and the order within the teams doesn’t matter.

That is, we count A,B,C vs. D,E,F as the same splitting as F,D,E vs A,C,B.

David and Esther play the following game. Initially, there are three piles, each containing 1000 stones. The players take turns to make a move, with David going first. Each move consists of choosing one of the piles available, removing the unchosen pile(s) from the game, and then dividing the chosen pile into 2 or 3 non-empty piles. A player loses the game if they are unable to make a move. Prove that Esther can always win the game, no matter how David plays.

How many subsets are there of \(\{1,2,...,10\}\) (the integers from \(1\) to \(10\) inclusive) containing no consecutive digits? That is, we do count \(\{1,3,6,8\}\) but do not count \(\{1,3,6,7\}\).
For example, when \(n=3\), we have \(8\) subsets overall but only \(5\) contain no consecutive integers. The \(8\) subsets are \(\varnothing\) (the empty set), \(\{1\}\), \(\{2\}\), \(\{3\}\), \(\{1,3\}\), \(\{1,2\}\), \(\{2,3\}\) and \(\{1,2,3\}\), but we exclude the final three of these.