抽屉原则在数学竞赛中的应用.docVIP

【标题】抽屉原则在数学竞赛中的应用 【作者】郭仁基 【关键词】?抽屉原则???数学竞赛???染色??整除 【指导老师】金茂明 【专业】数学与应用数学 【正文】Illinois State University Mathematics DepartmentMAT 305: Combinatorics Topics for K-8 TeachersThe Pigeonhole Principle?At any given time in New York there live at least two people with the same number of hairs.?The statement above is a direct consequence of the Pigeonhole Principle:(1) If m pigeons are put into m pigeonholes, there is an empty hole iff theres a hole with more than one pigeon.??Variously known as the Dirichlet Principle, the statement admits an equivalent formulation:(2) If nm pigeons are put into m pigeonholes, theres a hole with more than one pigeon.??A more formal statement is also available:(3) Let?|A| denote the number of elements in a finite set A. For two finite sets A and B, there exists a 1-1 correspondence f: A-B iff?|A|=|B|.??Lets return for the moment to the existence of two persons in New York?(City) with the same number of hairs. I ran experiments with members of my family. My teenage son secured himself the highest marks sporting, in my estimate, about 900 hairs per square inch. Even assuming a pathological case of a 6 feet?(two-sided) fellow 50 inch across, covered with hair head, neck, shoulders and so on down to the toes, the fellow would have somewhere in the vicinity of 7,000,000 hairs which is probably a very gross over-estimate to start with. The Hammonds World Atlas I purchased some 15 years ago, estimates the population of the New York City between 7,500,000 and 9,000,000. The assertion therefore follows from the pigeonhole principle.Following is a more serious application.Example 1Let a be irrational. There exist infinitely many rational numbers r=p/q such that|a-r|Q-2NBSP;NBSP;ProofLet Q be a whole number, a positive integer. Assume also that a0. Consider the fractional parts?{0},?{a},?{2a},?...,?{Qa} of the first?(Q+1) multiples of a. By the pigeonhole principle, two of these must fall into one of the Q intervals?[0,1/Q