Problems

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?

If $A$ and $B$ are vertices of a polyhedron, define the distance $d(A, B)$ to be the minimum number of edges of the polyhedron one must traverse in order to connect $A$ and $B$ . For example, $\overline{AB}$ is an edge of the polyhedron, then $d(A, B) = 1$ , but if $\overline{AC}$ and $\overline{CB}$ are edges and …

Define an $upno$ to be a positive integer of $2$ or more digits where the digits are strictly increasing moving left to right. Similarly, define a $downno$ to be a positive integer of $2$ or more digits where the digits are strictly decreasing moving left to right. For instance, the number $258$ is an upno and $8620$ …

How many strings of length $5$ formed from the digits $0$ , $1$ , $2$ , $3$ , $4$ are there such that for each $j \in \{1,2,3,4\}$ , at least $j$ of the digits are less than $j$ ? (For example, $02214$ satisfies this condition because it contains at least $1$ digit less than $1$ , at least $2$ digits less than $2$ , at …

A pair of fair $6$ -sided dice is rolled $n$ times. What is the least value of $n$ such that the probability that the sum of the numbers face up on a roll equals $7$ at least once is greater than $\frac{1}{2}$ ?

Consider systems of three linear equations with unknowns $x$ , $y$ , and $z$ , \begin{align} a_1 x + b_1 y + c_1 z & = 0 \\ a_2 x + b_2 y + c_2 z & = 0 \\ a_3 x + b_3 y + c_3 z & = 0 \end{align} where each of the coefficients is either $0$ or $1$ and the system has a solution other than $x=y=z=0$ . For example, one …

Ant Amelia starts on the number line at $0$ and crawls in the following manner. For $n=1,2,3,$ Amelia chooses a time duration $t_n$ and an increment $x_n$ independently and uniformly at random from the interval $(0,1).$ During the $n$ th step of the process, Amelia moves $x_n$ units in the positive direction, using up …

Frieda the frog begins a sequence of hops on a $3 \times 3$ grid of squares, moving one square on each hop and choosing at random the direction of each hop-up, down, left, or right. She does not hop diagonally. When the direction of a hop would take Frieda off the grid, she "wraps around" and jumps to the opposite …

Una rolls $6$ standard $6$ -sided dice simultaneously and calculates the product of the $6{ }$ numbers obtained. What is the probability that the product is divisible by $4?$

Each of the $5{ }$ sides and the $5{ }$ diagonals of a regular pentagon are randomly and independently colored red or blue with equal probability. What is the probability that there will be a triangle whose vertices are among the vertices of the pentagon such that all of its sides have the same color?

For how many integers $n$ between $1$ and $50$ , inclusive, is $$\frac{(n^2-1)!}{(n!)^{n}}$$ an integer? (Recall that $0!=1$ .)

A red ball and a green ball are randomly and independently tossed into bins numbered with positive integers so that for each ball, the probability that it is tossed into bin $k$ is $2^{-k}$ for $k=1,2,3,\ldots.$ What is the probability that the red ball is tossed into a higher-numbered bin than the green ball?

Let $S$ be the set of all positive integer divisors of $100,000.$ How many numbers are the product of two distinct elements of $S?$

How many subsets of $\{2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9\}$ contain at least one prime number?

At a gathering of $30$ people, there are $20$ people who all know each other and $10$ people who know no one. People who know each other hug, and people who do not know each other shake hands. How many handshakes occur?

How many triangles with positive area have all their vertices at points $(i,j)$ in the coordinate plane, where $i$ and $j$ are integers between $1$ and $5$ , inclusive?

How many of the base-ten numerals for the positive integers less than or equal to $2017$ contain the digit $0$ ?

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 …

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?

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 $A?$

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?

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?

Daphne is visited periodically by her three best friends: Alice, Beatrix, and Claire. Alice visits every third day, Beatrix visits every fourth day, and Claire visits every fifth day. All three friends visited Daphne yesterday. How many days of the next 365-day period will exactly two friends visit her?

Seven distinct pieces of candy are to be distributed among three bags. The red bag and the blue bag must each receive at least one piece of candy; the white bag may remain empty. How many arrangements are possible?

Three distinct vertices of a cube are chosen at random. What is the probability that the plane determined by these three vertices contains points inside the cube?