Questions tagged [pigeonhole-principle]

This tag is for questions involving the Pigeonhole Principle, which roughly states that if $n$ items are placed in $m$ containers and $n>m$, then at least one container has more than one item.

The Pigeonhole Principle roughly states that if $n$ items (e.g. pigeons) are placed in $m$ containers (e.g. pigeonholes) and $n>m,$ then at least one container has more than one item. Stated more formally, the Pigeonhole Principle asserts that there is no injective function whose codomain has smaller cardinality than its domain.

An example application of the Pigeonhole Principle is a demonstration that if five points are placed on a sphere, then there must be some hemisphere which contains at least four of these points: any two points define a great circle, which divides the sphere into two hemispheres. By the Pigeonhole Principle, one of these two hemispheres must contain at least two points. This hemisphere then contains four of the five points (the two on the boundary, and the two found via the Pigeonhole Principle).

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Pigeonhole again

There are $10$ bird cages with the maximum of $5$ birds inside it. How many birds should be prepared so that I can be sure that there are $3$ cages with $2$ birds inside it? My answer : I fitted all the cages with $1$ bird, that means $10$ and I…
Godlixe
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Pigeonhole principle about finding a specific group of four people

A bridge club has $10$ members. Every day, four members of the club get together and play one game of bridge. Prove that after two years, there is some particular set of four members that has played at least four games of bridge together.
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19 arrows hit the target in the form of a regular hexagon page length of 1 m. Show that at least two arrows are less than 60 cm away.

Problem: 19 arrows hit the target in the form of a regular hexagon page length of 1 m. Show that at least two arrows are less than 60 cm away. My attempt: Idea is to use Pigeonhole principle to solve this problem. In this type of problem we need…
josf
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Pigeonholes problem help please

Let $L$ be a list (not necessarily in alphabetical order) of the 26 letters in the English alphabet (which consists of 5 vowels, and 21 consonants). a) Show that $L$ has a sublist consisting of four or more consecutive consonants. b) Assuming that…
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Pigeon hole principle doubt

Question Of 12 distinct two digits numbers we can select 2 with a two digit difference of the form aa Can anyone please explain me what this question means
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Any subset of size six from the set $S = \{1,2,3,...,9\}$ must contain two elements whose sum is $10$.

I encountered into the following problem from Wikipedia from "Pigeonhole principle" page. Any subset of size six from the set $S = \{1,2,3,...,9\}$ must contain two elements whose sum is $10$. Proof: The pigeonholes will be labelled by the two…
RFZ
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What is the smallest number of integers in a list to guarantee two subsets of the integers have the same sum?

You generate a list of random 5-digit integers between 10000 and 99999. What is the smallest number of integers in your list to guarantee two subsets of the integers have the same sum? I know that there are $2^n$ subsets where $n=|A|$ and $A$ is…
Hedylove
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Odd number of cameras with distinct distinct distances between them

There is an odd number of cameras in an area, placed in a way that the distance between any two cameras is unique. Each camera is pointed towards the nearest camera. Show that at least one camera is not being monitored. I've been thinking about this…
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There are 5 st and 5 ave. A block is a square of side length 1. There are 26 booths on those streets. Show that there are 2 booths at most 1 mi apart.

In this case, I am assuming that each street and avenue must form a block, so the only case is where the two blocks are adjacent. Therefore, the total distance of the streets and avenues is 7, but there are 26 phone booths. Through pigeonhole, we…
Gerard L.
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Prove that it is no possible to separate rocks weighing $1,3,...33$ pounds into any number of piles so that the weight of each pile is the same.

I tries to solve it by attempting to show that the weights cannot be equal by showing through pigeonhole, but I got stuck since there are too many cases to prove. How would I solve this?
Gerard L.
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How to solve this Pigeon-hole Problem.

show that there must be at least 90 ways to choose six number from 1 to 15 so that all choices have same sum. Thanks.
user442346
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Pigeonhole principle to prove distance between two players

An NFL playing field is 360 ft by 160 ft. Prove that during an NFL game: (a) Two of the 22 players are within 75 ft of each other. (b) Four of the 22 players are within 50 yards of each other. My question is can I divide the field into squares of 50…
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Prove that there are at least 3 similar digital sums among 35 integers

I am trying to solve the following problem: Digital sum is defined as the sum of the decimal digits of an integer. E.g. Digital sum of 385 = 3+8+5 = 16. Among 35 two-digit integers ($ \ge 10 $), show that there are 3 integers that share the…
Donald
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least number of items required to satisfy one of three given conditions?

A basket of fruits is being arranged out of apples, bananas and oranges . What is the smallest number of pieces of fruit that need to be put into the basket to ensure that there are at least 8 apples or at least 6 bananas or at least 9 oranges ? So…