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24th Hellenic Mathematical Olympiad

Greece counting and probability

Problem

At each square of a chessboard we put one of the numbers or . We denote by the product of the numbers of the -row, and by the product of the numbers of the -column, . Prove that:

Solution
We have , because each element of the table appears two times, one in a row and one in a column, and so the number of in the product is even, say, for example .

Therefore the number of will be .

If , which is absurd, because does not divide . Hence .

Techniques

Invariants / monovariantsIntegers