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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Problem with $20$ integers less than $70$

20 pairwise distinct integers each less than 70 are taken and their pairwise differences are taken(magnitude of the difference). Show that there always exists 4 equal numbers. I somehow found the range of the differences and tried to show that…
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Pigeonhole Principle and Sets

Can anyone point me in the right direction for this homework question? I know what the pigeonhole principle is but don't see how it helps :( Let $n\geqslant 1$ be an integer and consider the set S = {1,2,.....,2n}. Let T be an arbitrary subset of S…
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Improving statement obtained by Pigeonhole principle

In this MSE question, this statement is proven: Room is cube-shaped, with side 3m. 136 flies fly in it. Prove that at any moment one can encompass 6 flies with a sphere of radius 90cm. Can the statement be strengthened in the sense that 6 is…
VividD
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Show that for any subset of $10$ distinct integers there exists two disjoint subsets equal in sum

The title abbreviates the following homework exercise on the Pigeonhole Principle. Show that for any set of $10$ distinct integers from $1 \dots 60$ there exists two disjoint subsets of equal sum. (The $2$ disjoint sets may not include all $10$…
NaN
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Pigeonhole principle on two coloured circle

Suppose a circle is divided into 200 congruent sectors, with 100 of them coloured red and the other 100 blue. A smaller concentric circle is placed on the larger circle and also so divided and coloured. Prove that no matter how the 100 red sectors…
Jessica
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Pigeonhole problem finding the minimum

There are 20 meetings. each neeting has 8 attendees. However, no pair of attendees appear more than once. What is the minimum number of people? To be more specific once a specific pair of people appear in a meeting, this pair will not appear again…
Door
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How to use Pigeon Hole Principle here?

Here is the question: There are 17 distinct positive integers such that none of them has a prime factor exceeding 10. Show that product of some two of them is a square. Now, how to do this using Pigeon Hole Principle? I have absolutely no idea…
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What is the minimum number of people in a single room so that it can be sure to say"There are two people in this room whose birthday is in February "?

This problem is from BdMO. I am confused with the problem. Shouldn't it be infinity as there can be many people who have same birthday?
F Nishat
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Pigeonhole principle - divisibility by $7$.

Take a natural number $x$ that has $7$ digits. Show that we can delete consecutive digits from it's start or from it's end (or both), such that the number we end with is divisible by $7$ (we can delete 6 digits or less). For example if…
Omer
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show that $\left|\frac{x_{i}}{x_{j}}-\frac{x_{k}}{x_{l}}\right|<\frac{1}{2}$

Let $x_{1},x_{2},x_{3},x_{4},x_{5}$ be $5$ distinct postive real numbers, show that : There exist four distinct postive real numbers $x_{i},x_{j},x_{k},x_{l}$ where $i,j,k,l\in \{1,2,3,4,5\}$,such…
math110
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How to prove that there is at least 1 triangle of same colour?

In a space , there are given $p(n) =[en!]+1$ points. Each pair is connected by a line, and each line is coloured with one of $n$ colours. How to prove that there is ar least one triangle with same colour? (Here $[\cdot ]$ is the greatest integer…
Suprabha
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Pigeon - Hole principle and remainder modulus

Given any 17 integers.Prove that there is at least one subset of 9 integers whose sum is divisible by 9 Try- I know pigeonhole principle will be used but how to proceed?
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Qn on Pigeon-Hole Principle

Let S be a set of 10 positive integers ≤ 50. Show that there two different (but not necessarily disjoint) subsets of four integers such that the sums of the 4 integers in the sets are equal. Having problems identifying which should be the…
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Pigeonhole principle problem involving circle and its chords

Several chords are drawn in a circle of radius 1 such that each diameter intersects no more than 4 of them. Prove that the sum of their lengths does not exceed 13.
Akshit
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Extended Pigeonhole Principle: How to prove it?

A version of the pigeonhole principle is: (1) If m objects are put in n boxes and n < m, then at least one box contains at least ceil(m/n) objects An alternate (more generalized) version is: (2) For a nonempty finite collection of integers (not…
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