Problems

Carlos uses a $4$ -digit passcode to unlock his computer. In his passcode, exactly one digit is even, exactly one (possibly different) digit is prime, and no digit is $0$ . How many $4$ -digit passcodes satisfy these conditions?

Six chairs are arranged around a round table. Two students and two teachers randomly select four of the chairs to sit in. What is the probability that the two students will sit in two adjacent chairs and the two teachers will also sit in two adjacent chairs?

There are three jars. Each of three coins is placed in one of the three jars, chosen at random and independently of the placements of the other coins. What is the expected number of coins in a jar with the most coins?

Call a positive integer fair if no digit is used more than once, it has no 0s, and no digit is adjacent to two greater digits. For example, $196$ , $23$ , and $12463$ are fair, but $1546$ , $320$ , and $34321$ are not fair. How many fair positive integers are there?

A point $P$ is chosen at random inside square $ABCD$ . The probability that $\overline{AP}$ is neither the shortest nor the longest side of $\triangle APB$ can be written as $\frac{a + b \pi - c \sqrt{d}}{e}$ , where $a, b, c, d,$ and $e$ are positive integers, $\text{gcd}(a, b, c, e) = 1$ , and $d$ is not divisible by …

How many ordered triples of integers $(x, y, z)$ satisfy the following system of inequalities? \begin{align} -x-y-z&\le -2\\ -x+y+z&\le 2\\ x-y+z&\le 2\\ x+y-z&\le 2 \end{align}

On Monday, $6$ students went to the tutoring center at the same time, and each one was randomly assigned to one of the $6$ tutors on duty. On Tuesday, the same $6$ students showed up, the same $6$ tutors were on duty, and the students were again randomly assigned to the tutors. What is the probability that exactly $2$ …

Nine athletes, no two of whom are the same height, try out for the basketball team. One at a time, they draw a wristband at random, without replacement, from a bag containing $3$ blue bands, $3$ red bands, and $3$ green bands. They are divided into a blue group, a red group, and a green group. The tallest member of …

A circle has been divided into $6$ sectors of different sizes. Then $2$ of the sectors are painted red, $2$ painted green, and $2$ painted blue so that no two neighboring sectors are painted the same color. One such coloring is shown below. How many different colorings are possible?

Each of the $9$ squares in a $3 \times 3$ grid is to be colored red, blue, or yellow in such a way that each red square shares an edge with at least one blue square, each blue square shares an edge with at least one yellow square, and each yellow square shares an edge with at least one red square. Colorings that can be …

A seven-digit positive integer is chosen at random. What is the probability that the number is divisible by $11$ , given that the sum of its digits is $61?$

A frog hops along the number line according to the following rules. $\qquad\bullet$ It starts at $0$ . $\qquad\bullet$ If it is at $0$ , then it moves to $1$ with probability $\tfrac{1}{2}$ and it disappears with probability $\tfrac{1}{2}$ . $\qquad\bullet$ For $n = 1, 2,$ or $3,$ if it is at $n,$ then it moves to …

What is the minimum number of successive swaps of adjacent letters in the string $ABCDEF$ that are needed to change the string to $FEDCBA?$ (For example, $3$ swaps are required to change $ABC$ to $CBA;$ one such sequence of swaps is $ABC\to BAC\to BCA\to CBA.$ )

In how many ways can $6$ juniors and $6$ seniors form $3$ disjoint teams of $4$ people so that each team has $2$ juniors and $2$ seniors?

Two teams are in a best-two-out-of-three playoff: the teams will play at most $3$ games, and the winner of the playoff is the first team to win $2$ games. The first game is played on Team A's home field, and the remaining games are played on Team B's home field. Team A has a $\frac{2}{3}$ chance of winning at home, and …

A bee is moving in three-dimensional space. A fair six-sided die with faces labeled $A^+, A^-, B^+, B^-, C^+,$ and $C^-$ is rolled. Suppose the bee occupies the point $(a,b,c).$ If the die shows $A^+$ , then the bee moves to the point $(a+1,b,c)$ and if the die shows $A^-,$ then the bee moves to the point $(a-1,b,c).$ …

The figure below shows a dotted grid $8$ cells wide and $3$ cells tall consisting of $1''\times1''$ squares. Carl places $1$ -inch toothpicks along some of the sides of the squares to create a closed loop that does not intersect itself. The numbers in the cells indicate the number of sides of that square that are to be …

In a long line of people arranged left to right, the 1013th person from the left is also the 1010th person from the right. How many people are in the line?

A group of $100$ students from different countries meet at a mathematics competition. Each student speaks the same number of languages, and, for every pair of students $A$ and $B$ , student $A$ speaks some language that student $B$ does not speak, and student $B$ speaks some language that student $A$ does not speak. …

A dartboard is the region $B$ in the coordinate plane consisting of points $(x, y)$ such that $|x| + |y| \le 8$ . A target $T$ is the region where $(x^2 + y^2 - 25)^2 \le 49$ . A dart is thrown and lands at a random point in B. The probability that the dart lands in $T$ can be expressed as $\frac{m}{n} \cdot \pi$ , …

Jerry likes to play with numbers. One day, he wrote all the integers from $1$ to $2024$ on the whiteboard. Then he repeatedly chose four numbers on the whiteboard, erased them, and replaced them by either their sum or their product. (For example, Jerry's first step might have been to erase $1$ , $2$ , $3$ , and $5$ , …

In a race among $5$ snails, there is at most one tie, but that tie can involve any number of snails. For example, the result might be that Dazzler is first; Abby, Cyrus, and Elroy are tied for second; and Bruna is fifth. How many different results of the race are possible?

Three different pairs of shoes are placed in a row so that no left shoe is next to a right shoe from a different pair. In how many ways can these six shoes be lined up?

A group of $16$ people will be partitioned into $4$ indistinguishable $4$ -person committees. Each committee will have one chairperson and one secretary. The number of different ways to make these assignments can be written as $3^{r}M$ , where $r$ and $M$ are positive integers and $M$ is not divisible by $3$ . What is …

An integer is assigned to each vertex of a cube. The value of an edge is defined to be the sum of the values of the two vertices it touches, and the value of a face is defined to be the sum of the values of the four edges surrounding it. The value of the cube is defined as the sum of the values of its six faces. …