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Problems from Ukrainian Authors

Ukraine counting and probability

Problem

Let be a polynomial with integer coefficients of degree . For the set of positive integers denote . The positive integers are such that . Prove that the set can be split into disjoint subsets of equal size such that . (Klurman Oleksiy)
Solution
Let . We will construct the desired splitting in the following way. To determine which of the subsets each number belongs to, let us write in the form: where is an integer, , , i.e. we write the remainder of divided by in base numeral system. We include the number to subset , if . Let us show that such splitting satisfies the condition. Clearly, it is enough to prove our statement for polynomials of the form , .

We have where denotes the sum over all tuples of numbers from the set such that . Let us show that the inner sum does not depend on . Denoting , we can transform it by expanding the brackets: where denotes the sum over all tuples of non-negative integers such that . Since , there is at least one number among which equals zero. Suppose that , then because for any tuple of numbers from there is a unique number for which . The last sum is clearly independent of , which is what we wanted to prove.

Techniques

Coloring schemes, extremal argumentsRecursion, bijectionPolynomial operationsOther