Problems

There are $20$ students participating in an after-school program offering classes in yoga, bridge, and painting. Each student must take at least one of these three classes, but may take two or all three. There are $10$ students taking yoga, $13$ taking bridge, and $9$ taking painting. There are $9$ students taking at …

Call a positive integer $\textbf{monotonous}$ if it is a one-digit number or its digits, when read from left to right, form either a strictly increasing or a strictly decreasing sequence. For example, $3$ , $23578$ , and $987620$ are monotonous, but $88$ , $7434$ , and $23557$ are not. How many monotonous positive …

In the figure below, $3$ of the $6$ disks are to be painted blue, $2$ are to be painted red, and $1$ is to be painted green. Two paintings that can be obtained from one another by a rotation or a reflection of the entire figure are considered the same. How many different paintings are possible?

Three distinct integers are selected at random between $1$ and $2016$ , inclusive. Which of the following is a correct statement about the probability $p$ that the product of the three integers is odd?

Let $N$ be a positive multiple of $5$ . One red ball and $N$ green balls are arranged in a line in random order. Let $P(N)$ be the probability that at least $\tfrac{3}{5}$ of the green balls are on the same side of the red ball. Observe that $P(5)=1$ and that $P(N)$ approaches $\tfrac{4}{5}$ as $N$ grows large. What is …

Each vertex of a cube is to be labeled with an integer $1$ through $8$ , with each integer being used once, in such a way that the sum of the four numbers on the vertices of a face is the same for each face. Arrangements that can be obtained from each other through rotations of the cube are considered to be the same. …

For some particular value of $N$ , when $(a+b+c+d+1)^N$ is expanded and like terms are combined, the resulting expression contains exactly $1001$ terms that include all four variables $a, b,c,$ and $d$ , each to some positive power. What is $N$ ?

Two different numbers are selected at random from $( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)$ and multiplied together. What is the probability that the product is even?

All the numbers $1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9$ are written in a $3\times3$ array of squares, one number in each square, in such a way that if two numbers are consecutive then they occupy squares that share an edge. The numbers in the four corners add up to $18$ . What is the number in the center?

A set of teams held a round-robin tournament in which every team played every other team exactly once. Every team won $10$ games and lost $10$ games; there were no ties. How many sets of three teams $\{A, B, C\}$ were there in which $A$ beat $B$ , $B$ beat $C$ , and $C$ beat $A?$

Ann made a 3-step staircase using 18 toothpicks as shown in the figure. How many toothpicks does she need to add to complete a 5-step staircase?

How many rearrangements of $abcd$ are there in which no two adjacent letters are also adjacent letters in the alphabet? For example, no such rearrangements could include either $ab$ or $ba$ .

Claudia has 12 coins, each of which is a 5-cent coin or a 10-cent coin. There are exactly 17 different values that can be obtained as combinations of one or more of her coins. How many 10-cent coins does Claudia have?

Eight people are sitting around a circular table, each holding a fair coin. All eight people flip their coins and those who flip heads stand while those who flip tails remain seated. What is the probability that no two adjacent people will stand?

Let $S$ be a square of side length $1$ . Two points are chosen at random on the sides of $S$ . The probability that the straight-line distance between the points is at least $\tfrac12$ is $\tfrac{a-b\pi}c$ , where $a$ , $b$ , and $c$ are positive integers with $\gcd(a,b,c)=1$ . What is $a+b+c$ ?

Al, Bill, and Cal will each randomly be assigned a whole number from $1$ to $10$ , inclusive, with no two of them getting the same number. What is the probability that Al's number will be a whole number multiple of Bill's and Bill's number will be a whole number multiple of Cal's?

Johann has $64$ fair coins. He flips all the coins. Any coin that lands on tails is tossed again. Coins that land on tails on the second toss are tossed a third time. What is the expected number of coins that are now heads?

Erin the ant starts at a given corner of a cube and crawls along exactly $7$ edges in such a way that she visits every corner exactly once and then finds that she is unable to return along an edge to her starting point. How many paths are there meeting these conditions?

Walking down Jane Street, Ralph passed four houses in a row, each painted a different color. He passed the orange house before the red house, and he passed the blue house before the yellow house. The blue house was not next to the yellow house. How many orderings of the colored houses are possible?

Three fair six-sided dice are rolled. What is the probability that the values shown on two of the dice sum to the value shown on the remaining die?

Four fair six-sided dice are rolled. What is the probability that at least three of the four dice show the same value?

Two concentric circles have radii $1$ and $2$ . Two points on the outer circle are chosen independently and uniformly at random. What is the probability that the chord joining the two points intersects the inner circle?

The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are to be arranged in a circle. An arrangement is bad if it is not true that for every $n$ from $1$ to $15$ one can find a subset of the numbers that appear consecutively on the circle that sum to $n$ . Arrangements that differ only by a rotation or a reflection are considered the same. How …

In a small pond there are eleven lily pads in a row labeled $0$ through $10$ . A frog is sitting on pad $1$ . When the frog is on pad $N$ , $0<N<10$ , it will jump to pad $N-1$ with probability $\frac{N}{10}$ and to pad $N+1$ with probability $1-\frac{N}{10}$ . Each jump is independent of the previous jumps. If the …

A student must choose a program of four courses from a menu of courses consisting of English, Algebra, Geometry, History, Art, and Latin. This program must contain English and at least one mathematics course. In how many ways can this program be chosen?