Problems

Age
Difficulty
Found: 1816

A resident of one foreign intelligence agency informed the centre about the forthcoming signing of a number of bilateral agreements between the fifteen former republics of the USSR. According to his report, each of them will conclude an agreement exactly with three others. Should this resident be trusted?

In Mongolia there are in circulation coins of 3 and 5 tugriks. An entrance ticket to the central park costs 4 tugriks. One day before the opening of the park, a line of 200 visitors queued up in front of the ticket booth. Each of them, as well as the cashier, has exactly 22 tugriks. Prove that all of the visitors will be able to buy a ticket in the order of the queue.

There is a \(5\times 9\) rectangle drawn on squared paper. In the lower left corner of the rectangle is a button. Kevin and Sophie take turns moving the button any number of squares either to the right or up. Kevin goes first. The winner is the one who places the button in upper right corner. Who would win, Kevin or Sophie, by using the right strategy?

The student did not notice the multiplication sign between two three-digit numbers and wrote one six-digit number, which turned out to be seven times bigger than their product. Determine these numbers.

The student did not notice the multiplication sign between two seven-digit numbers and wrote one fourteen-digit number, which turned out to be three times bigger than their product. Determine these numbers.

A cherry which is a ball of radius r is dropped into a round glass whose axial section is the graph of the function \(y = x^4\). At what maximum r will the ball touch the most bottom point of the bottom of the glass? (In other words, what is the maximum radius r of a circle lying in the region \(y \geq x^4\) and containing the origin?).

Cut the interval \([-1, 1]\) into black and white segments so that the integrals of any a) linear function; b) a square trinomial in white and black segments are equal.

Consider the powers of the number five: 1, 5, 25, 125, 625, ... We form the sequence of their first digits: 1, 5, 2, 1, 6, ...

Prove that any part of this sequence, written in reverse order, will occur in the sequence of the first digits of the powers of the number two (1, 2, 4, 8, 1, 3, 6, 1, ...).

Three functions are written on the board: \(f_1 (x) = x + 1/x\), \(f_2 (x) = x^2, f_3 (x) = (x - 1)^2\). You can add, subtract and multiply these functions (and you can square, cube, etc. them). You can also multiply them by an arbitrary number, add an arbitrary number to them, and also do these operations with the resulting expressions. Therefore, try to get the function \(1/x\).

Prove that if you erase any of the functions \(f_1, f_2, f_3\) from the board, it is impossible to get \(1/x\).