Sequences & Series

What is the value of $(2(2(2(2(2(2+1)+1)+1)+1)+1)+1)$ ?

How many terms are there in the arithmetic sequence $13$ , $16$ , $19$ , . . ., $70$ , $73$ ?

Let $X$ and $Y$ be the following sums of arithmetic sequences: $$\begin{array}{rcl} X &=& 10 + 12 + 14 + \cdots + 100, \\ Y &=& 12 + 14 + 16 + \cdots + 102. \end{array}$$ What is the value of $Y - X$ ?

What is $(-1)^{1} + (-1)^{2} + ... + (-1)^{2006}$  ?

At each basketball practice last week, Jenny made twice as many free throws as she made at the previous practice. At her fifth practice she made $48$ free throws. How many free throws did she make at the first practice?

What is the difference between the sum of the first $2003$ even counting numbers and the sum of the first $2003$ odd counting numbers?

The sum of $5$ consecutive even integers is $4$ less than the sum of the first $8$ consecutive odd counting numbers. What is the smallest of the even integers?

A Pascal-like triangle has $10$ as the top row and $10$ followed by $1$ as the second row. In each subsequent row the first number is $10$ , the last number is $1$ , and, as in the standard Pascal's Triangle, each other number in the row is the sum of the two numbers directly above it. The first four rows are shown below:

$\begin{array}{ccccccc} &&&10&&&\\ &&10&&1&& \\ &10&&11&&1& \\ 10&&21&&12&&1 \\ \end{array}$

What is the sum of the digits of the sum of the numbers in the $11$ th row?

Consider the sequence of positive integers

$$1,2,1,2,3,2,1,2,3,4,3,2,1,2,3,4,5,4,3,2,1,2,3,4,5,6,5,4,3,2,1,2,\dots$$

What is the $2025$ th term in this sequence?

In the following expression, Melanie changed some of the plus signs to minus signs: $$1+3+5+7+...+97+99$$ When the new expression was evaluated, it was negative. What is the least number of plus signs that Melanie could have changed to minus signs?

Consider the following operation. Given a positive integer $n$ , if $n$ is a multiple of $3$ , then you replace $n$ by $\frac{n}{3}$ . If $n$ is not a multiple of $3$ , then you replace $n$ by $n+10$ . For example, beginning with $n=4$ , this procedure gives $4\to14\to24\to8\to18\to6\to2\to12\to\cdots$ . Suppose you start with $n=100$ . What value results if you perform this operation exactly $100$ times?

Balls numbered 1, 2, 3, ... are deposited in 5 bins, labeled A, B, C, D, and E, using the following procedure. Ball 1 is deposited in bin A, and balls 2 and 3 are deposited in bin B. The next 3 balls are deposited in bin C, the next 4 in bin D, and so on, cycling back to bin A after balls are deposited in bin E. (For example, balls numbered 22, 23, ..., 28 are deposited in bin B at step 7 of this process.) In which bin is ball 2024 deposited?

The sum $$\frac{1}{2!}+\frac{2}{3!}+\frac{3}{4!}+\cdots+\frac{2021}{2022!}$$ can be expressed as $a-\frac{1}{b!}$ , where $a$ and $b$ are positive integers. What is $a+b$ ?

A cart rolls down a hill, travelling $5$ inches the first second and accelerating so that during each successive $1$ -second time interval, it travels $7$ inches more than during the previous $1$ -second interval. The cart takes $30$ seconds to reach the bottom of the hill. How far, in inches, does it travel?

What is the value of

$$1+2+3-4+5+6+7-8+\cdots+197+198+199-200?$$

The $25$ integers from $-10$ to $14,$ inclusive, can be arranged to form a $5$ -by- $5$ square in which the sum of the numbers in each row, the sum of the numbers in each column, and the sum of the numbers along each of the main diagonals are all the same. What is the value of this common sum?

Sara makes a staircase out of toothpicks as shown:

This is a $3$ -step staircase and uses $18$ toothpicks. How many steps would be in a staircase that used $180$ toothpicks?

A triangular array of $2016$ coins has $1$ coin in the first row, $2$ coins in the second row, $3$ coins in the third row, and so on up to $N$ coins in the $N$ th row. What is the sum of the digits of $N$ ?

Jo and Blair take turns counting from $1$ to one more than the last number said by the other person. Jo starts by saying " $1$ ", so Blair follows by saying " $1, 2$ " . Jo then says " $1, 2, 3$ " , and so on. What is the 53rd number said?

Mary divides a circle into $12$ sectors. The central angles of these sectors, measured in degrees, are all integers and they form an arithmetic sequence. What is the degree measure of the smallest possible sector angle?

Consider the set of numbers $\{1, 10, 10^2, 10^3, \ldots, 10^{10}\}$ . The ratio of the largest element of the set to the sum of the other ten elements of the set is closest to which integer?

Positive integers $a$ , $b$ , and $2009$ , with $a<b<2009$ , form a geometric sequence with an integer ratio. What is $a$ ?

For each positive integer $n$ , the mean of the first $n$ terms of a sequence is $n$ . What is the 2008th term of the sequence?

Suppose that $(u_n)$ is a sequence of real numbers satisfying $u_{n+2}=2u_{n+1}+u_n$ ,

and that $u_3=9$ and $u_6=128$ . What is $u_5$ ?

A grocer makes a display of cans in which the top row has one can and each lower row has two more cans than the row above it. If the display contains $100$ cans, how many rows does it contain?

A grocer stacks oranges in a pyramid-like stack whose rectangular base is $5$ oranges by $8$ oranges. Each orange above the first level rests in a pocket formed by four oranges below. The stack is completed by a single row of oranges. How many oranges are in the stack?

The second and fourth terms of a geometric sequence are $2$ and $6$ . Which of the following is a possible first term?

Consider the dark square in an array of unit squares, part of which is shown. The first ring of squares around this center square contains $8$ unit squares. The second ring contains $16$ unit squares. If we continue this process, the number of unit squares in the $100^\text{th}$ ring is

Figures $0$ , $1$ , $2$ , and $3$ consist of $1$ , $5$ , $13$ , and $25$ nonoverlapping unit squares, respectively. If the pattern were continued, how many nonoverlapping unit squares would there be in figure 100?

The sum $$\sum_{k=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{k^3 + 6k^2 + 8k}$$ can be expressed as $\frac{a}{b}$ , where $a$ and $b$ are relatively prime positive integers. What is $a + b$ ?

The sequence $1,x,y,z$ is arithmetic. The sequence $1,p,q,z$ is geometric. Both sequences are strictly increasing and contain only integers, and $z$ is as small as possible. What is the value of $x+y+z+p+q$ ?

In the figure below, the outside square contains infinitely many squares, each of them with the same center and sides parallel to the outside square. The ratio of the side length of a square to the side length of the next inner square is $k$ , where $0 < k < 1.$ The spaces between squares are alternately shaded as shown in the figure (which is not necessarily drawn to scale).

The area of the shaded portion of the figure is $64\%$ of the area of the original square. What is $k$ ?

What is the ones digit of the sum $$\lfloor \sqrt{1} \rfloor + \lfloor \sqrt{2} \rfloor + \lfloor \sqrt{3} \rfloor + \dots + \lfloor \sqrt{2025} \rfloor?$$ (Recall that $\lfloor x \rfloor$ represents the greatest integer less than or equal to $x$ .)

An array of numbers is constructed beginning with the numbers $-1\qquad3\qquad1$ in the top row. Each adjacent pair of numbers is summed to produce a number in the next row. Each row begins and ends with $-1$ and $1$ , respectively.

$$\begin{array}{ccccccccc} &&-1&&3&&1&&\\ &-1&&2&&4&&1&\\ -1&&1&&6&&5&&1\\ \end{array}$$

If the process continues, one of the rows will sum to $12,288$ . In that row, what is the third number from the left?

An even number of circles are nested, starting with a radius of $1$ and increasing by $1$ each time, all sharing a common point. The region between every other circle is shaded, starting with the region inside the circle of radius $2$ but outside the circle of radius $1.$ An example showing $8$ circles is displayed below. What is the least number of circles needed to make the total shaded area at least $2023\pi$ ?

Let $S_n$ be the sum of the first $n$ terms of an arithmetic sequence that has a common difference of $2$ . The quotient $\frac{S_{3n}}{S_n}$ does not depend on $n$ . What is $S_{20}$ ?

Henry decides one morning to do a workout, and he walks $\tfrac{3}{4}$ of the way from his home to his gym. The gym is $2$ kilometers away from Henry's home. At that point, he changes his mind and walks $\tfrac{3}{4}$ of the way from where he is back toward home. When he reaches that point, he changes his mind again and walks $\tfrac{3}{4}$ of the distance from there back toward the gym. If Henry keeps changing his mind when he has walked $\tfrac{3}{4}$ of the distance toward either the gym or home from the point where he last changed his mind, he will get very close to walking back and forth between a point $A$ kilometers from home and a point $B$ kilometers from home. What is $|A-B|$ ?

A sequence of numbers is defined recursively by $a_1 = 1$ , $a_2 = \frac{3}{7}$ , and $$a_n=\frac{a_{n-2} \cdot a_{n-1}}{2a_{n-2} - a_{n-1}}$$ for all $n \geq 3$ . Then $a_{2019}$ can be written as $\frac{p}{q}$ , where $p$ and $q$ are relatively prime positive integers. What is $p+q ?$

A function $f$ is defined recursively by $f(1)=f(2)=1$ and $$f(n)=f(n-1)-f(n-2)+n$$ for all integers $n \geq 3$ . What is $f(2018)$ ?

The sum of an infinite geometric series is a positive number $S$ , and the second term in the series is $1$ . What is the smallest possible value of $S?$

In the eight-term sequence $A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H$ , the value of $C$ is 5 and the sum of any three consecutive terms is 30. What is $A+H$ ?

The figures $F_1$ , $F_2$ , $F_3$ , and $F_4$ shown are the first in a sequence of figures. For $n\ge3$ , $F_n$ is constructed from $F_{n - 1}$ by surrounding it with a square and placing one more diamond on each side of the new square than $F_{n - 1}$ had on each side of its outside square. For example, figure $F_3$ has $13$ diamonds. How many diamonds are there in figure $F_{20}$ ?

On Monday, Millie puts a quart of seeds, $25\%$ of which are millet, into a bird feeder. On each successive day she adds another quart of the same mix of seeds without removing any seeds that are left. Each day the birds eat only $25\%$ of the millet in the feeder, but they eat all of the other seeds. On which day, just after Millie has placed the seeds, will the birds find that more than half the seeds in the feeder are millet?

A number of linked rings, each $1$ cm thick, are hanging on a peg. The top ring has an outside diameter of $20$ cm. The outside diameter of each of the outer rings is $1$ cm less than that of the ring above it. The bottom ring has an outside diameter of $3$ cm. What is the distance, in cm, from the top of the top ring to the bottom of the bottom ring?

Let $a_1 , a_2 , ...$ be a sequence for which $a_1=2$ , $a_2=3$ , and $a_n=\frac{a_{n-1}}{a_{n-2}}$ for each positive integer $n \ge 3$ . What is $a_{2006}$ ?

In the five-sided star shown, the letters $A$ , $B$ , $C$ , $D$ , and $E$ are replaced by the numbers $3$ , $5$ , $6$ , $7$ , and $9$ , although not necessarily in this order. The sums of the numbers at the ends of the line segments $\overline{AB}$ , $\overline{BC}$ , $\overline{CD}$ , $\overline{DE}$ , and $\overline{EA}$ form an arithmetic sequence, although not necessarily in this order. What is the middle term of the arithmetic sequence?

The first term of a sequence is $2005$ . Each succeeding term is the sum of the cubes of the digits of the previous term. What is the ${2005}^{\text{th}}$ term of the sequence?

A sequence of three real numbers forms an arithmetic progression with a first term of $9$ . If $2$ is added to the second term and $20$ is added to the third term, the three resulting numbers form a geometric progression. What is the smallest possible value for the third term in the geometric progression?

In the sequence $2001$ , $2002$ , $2003$ , $\ldots$ , each term after the third is found by subtracting the previous term from the sum of the two terms that precede that term. For example, the fourth term is $2001 + 2002 - 2003 = 2000$ . What is the $2004^\textrm{th}$ term in this sequence?

Suppose that $\{a_n\}$ is an arithmetic sequence with $$a_1+a_2+\cdots+a_{100}=100 \text{ and } a_{101}+a_{102}+\cdots+a_{200}=200.$$ What is the value of $a_2 - a_1 ?$

Consider a decreasing sequence of $n$ positive integers $x_1 > x_2 > \dotsb > x_n$ that satisfies the following two conditions:

$\qquad\bullet$ The average (arithmetic mean) of the first $3$ terms in the sequence is $2025.$

$\qquad\bullet$ For all $4 \leq k \leq n,$ the average of the first $k$ terms in the sequence is $1$ less than the average of the first $k - 1$ terms in the sequence.

What is the greatest possible value of ${n?}$

The first three terms of a geometric sequence are the integers $a, 720$ and $b$ , where $a < 720 < b$ . What is the sum of the digits of the least possible value of $b$ ?

The numbers, in order, of each row and the numbers, in order, of each column of a $5 \times 5$ array of integers form an arithmetic progression of length $5$ . The numbers in positions $(5, 5)$ , $(2, 4)$ , $(4, 3)$ and $(3, 1)$ are $0$ , $48$ , $16$ , and $12$ , respectively. What number is in position $(1, 2)$ ? $$\begin{bmatrix} . & ? &.&.&. \\ .&.&.&48&.\\ 12&.&.&.&.\\ .&.&16&.&.\\ .&.&.&.&0\end{bmatrix}$$

The Fibonacci numbers are defined by $F_1 = 1, F_2 = 1,$ and $F_n = F_{n-1} + F_{n-2}$ for $n \geq 3.$ What is $${\frac{F_2}{F_1}} + {\frac{F_4}{F_2}} + {\frac{F_6}{F_3}} + ... + {\frac{F_{20}}{F_{10}}}?$$

An arithmetic sequence of positive integers has $n\ge3$ terms, initial term $a$ , and common difference $d>1$ . Carl wrote down all the terms in this sequence correctly except for one term, which was off by $1$ . The sum of the terms he wrote down was $222$ . What is $a+d+n$ ?

A four-term sequence is formed by adding each term of a four-term arithmetic sequence of positive integers to the corresponding term of a four-term geometric sequence of positive integers. The first three terms of the resulting four-term sequence are $57$ , $60$ , and $91$ . What is the fourth term of this sequence?

Travis has to babysit the terrible Thompson triplets. Knowing that they love big numbers, Travis devises a counting game for them. First Tadd will say the number $1$ , then Todd must say the next two numbers ( $2$ and $3$ ), then Tucker must say the next three numbers ( $4$ , $5$ , $6$ ), then Tadd must say the next four numbers ( $7$ , $8$ , $9$ , $10$ ), and the process continues to rotate through the three children in order, each saying one more number than the previous child did, until the number $10,000$ is reached. What is the $2019$ th number said by Tadd?

Aaron the ant walks on the coordinate plane according to the following rules. He starts at the origin $p_0=(0,0)$ facing to the east and walks one unit, arriving at $p_1=(1,0)$ . For $n=1,2,3,\dots$ , right after arriving at the point $p_n$ , if Aaron can turn $90^\circ$ left and walk one unit to an unvisited point $p_{n+1}$ , he does that. Otherwise, he walks one unit straight ahead to reach $p_{n+1}$ . Thus the sequence of points continues $p_2=(1,1), p_3=(0,1), p_4=(-1,1), p_5=(-1,0)$ , and so on in a counterclockwise spiral pattern. What is $p_{2015}$ ?