HMMT November 2019

November 9, 2019
General Round
1. Dylan has a 100×100 square, and wants to cut it into pieces of area at least 1. Each cut must be a straight
line (not a line segment) and must intersect the interior of the square. What is the largest number of cuts
he can make?
Proposed by: Carl Schildkraut
Answer: 9999
Since each piece has area at least 1 and the original square has area 10000, Dylan can end up with at
most 10000 pieces. There is initially 1 piece, so the number of pieces can increase by at most 9999. Each
cut increases the number of pieces by at least 1, so Dylan can make at most 9999 cuts. Notice that this
1
is achievable if Dylan makes 9999 vertical cuts spaced at increments of 100 units.
2. Meghana writes two (not necessarily distinct) primes q and r in base 10 next to each other on a blackboard,
resulting in the concatenation of q and r (for example, if q = 13 and r = 5, the number on the blackboard
is now 135). She notices that three more than the resulting number is the square of a prime p. Find all
possible values of p.
Proposed by: Carl Schildkraut
Answer: 5
Trying p = 2, we see that p2 − 3 = 1 is not the concatenation of two primes, so p must be odd. Then
p2 − 3 is even. Since r is prime and determines the units digit of the concatenation of q and r, r must
be 2. Then p2 will have units digit 5, which means that p will have units digit 5. Since p is prime, we
find that p can only be 5, and in this case, p2 − 3 = 22 allows us to set q = r = 2 to satisfy the problem
statement. So there is a valid solution when p = 5, and this is the only possibility.

3. Katie has a fair 2019-sided die with sides labeled 1, 2, . . . , 2019. After each roll, she replaces her n-sided
die with an (n + 1)-sided die having the n sides of her previous die and an additional side with the number
she just rolled. What is the probability that Katie’s 2019th roll is a 2019?
Proposed by: Freddie Zhao
1
Answer:
2019
Since Katie’s original die is fair, the problem is perfectly symmetric. So on the 2019th roll, each number
1
is equally probable as any other. Therefore, the probability of rolling a 2019 is just 2019 .

4. In 4ABC, AB = 2019, BC = 2020, and CA = 2021. Yannick draws three regular n-gons in the plane of
4ABC so that each n-gon shares a side with a distinct side of 4ABC and no two of the n-gons overlap.
What is the maximum possible value of n?
Proposed by: Carl Schildkraut
Answer: 11
If any n-gon is drawn on the same side of one side of 4ABC as 4ABC itself, it will necessarily overlap
with another triangle whenever n > 3. Thus either n = 3 or the triangles are all outside ABC. The
interior angle of a regular n-gon is 180◦ · n−2
n , so we require

n−2
360◦ · + max(∠A, ∠B, ∠C) < 360◦ .
n
As 4ABC is almost equilateral (in fact the largest angle is less than 60.1◦ ), each angle is approximately
60◦ , so we require
n−2
360 · < 300 =⇒ n < 12.
n
Hence the answer is n = 11.
5. Let a, b, c be positive real numbers such that a ≤ b ≤ c ≤ 2a. Find the maximum possible value of
b c a
+ + .
a b c

Proposed by: Carl Schildkraut

7
Answer:
2
Fix the values of b, c. By inspecting the graph of
b x
f (x) = + ,
x c
we see that on any interval the graph attains its maximum at an endpoint. This argument applies when
we fix any two variables, so it suffices to check boundary cases in which b = a or b = c, and c = b or
c = 2a. All pairs of these conditions determine the ratio between a, b, c, except b = c and c = b, in which
case the boundary condition on a tells us that a = b or 2a = b = c. In summary, these cases are

(a, b, c) ∈ {(a, a, a), (a, a, 2a), (a, 2a, 2a)}.

The largest value achieved from any of these three is 27 .

6. Find all ordered pairs (a, b) of positive integers such that 2a + 1 divides 3b − 1 and 2b + 1 divides 3a − 1.
Proposed by: Milan Haiman
Answer: (2, 2), (12, 17), (17, 12)
This is equivalent to the existence of nonnegative integers c and d such that 3b − 1 = c(2a + 1) and
3a − 1 = d(2b + 1). Then

(3b − 1)(3a − 1) 3a − 1 3b − 1 3 3
cd = = · < · = 2.25.
(2a + 1)(2b + 1) 2a + 1 2b + 1 2 2

Neither c nor d can equal 0 since that would give a = 13 or b = 13 , so cd ≤ 2.25 implies (c, d) ∈
{(1, 1), (2, 1), (1, 2)}. Substituting (c, d) back in gives three systems of equations and the three solutions:
(2, 2), (12, 17), (17, 12).
7. In Middle-Earth, nine cities form a 3 by 3 grid. The top left city is the capital of Gondor and the bottom
right city is the capital of Mordor. How many ways can the remaining cities be divided among the two
nations such that all cities in a country can be reached from its capital via the grid-lines without passing
through a city of the other country?
Proposed by: Shengtong Zhang
Answer: 30
For convenience, we will center the grid on the origin of the coordinate plane and align the outer corners
of the grid with the points (±1, ±1), so that (−1, 1) is the capital of Gondor and (1, −1) is the capital of
Mordor.
We will use casework on which nation the city at (0, 0) is part of. Assume that is belongs to Gondor.
Then consider the sequence of cities at (1, 0), (1, 1), (0, 1). If one of these belongs to Mordor, then all of the
previous cities belong to Mordor, since Mordor must be connected. So we have 4 choices for which cities
belong to Mordor. Note that this also makes all the other cities in the sequence connected to Gondor.
Similarly, we have 4 (independent) choices for the sequence of cities (0, −1), (−1 − 1), (−1, 0). All of these
choices keep (0, 0) connected to Gondor except the choice that assigns all cities in both sequences to
Mordor. Putting this together, the answer is 2(4 · 4 − 1) = 30.
8. Compute the number of ordered pairs of integers (x, y) such that x2 + y 2 < 2019 and

x2 + min(x, y) = y 2 + max(x, y).

2
 Proposed by: Milan Haiman
Answer: 127
We have
x2 − y 2 = max(x, y) − min(x, y) = |x − y|
Now if x 6= y, we can divide by x − y to obtain x + y = ±1. Thus x = y or x + y = ±1.
If x = y, we see that 2019 > x2 + y 2 = 2x2 , so we see that −31 ≤ x ≤ 31. There are 63 ordered pairs in
this case.
In the second case, note that |x| ≥ |y| since x2 − y 2 = |x − y| ≥ 0. Since x + y = ±1, we cannot have
xy > 0, so either x ≥ 0, y ≤ 0, or x ≤ 0, y ≥ 0. In the first case, x + y = 1; in the second case, x + y = −1.
Thus, the solutions for (x, y) are of the form (k, 1 − k) or (−k, k − 1) for some k > 0. In either case, we
must have k 2 + (k − 1)2 < 2019, which holds true for any 1 ≤ k ≤ 32 but fails for k = 33. There are a
total of 32 · 2 = 64 solutions in this case.
In summary, there are a total of 63 + 64 = 127 integer solutions to the equation x2 + min (x, y) =
y 2 + max (x, y) with x2 + y 2 < 2019.

9. Let ABCD be an isosceles trapezoid with AD = BC = 255 and AB = 128. Let M be the midpoint of
CD and let N be the foot of the perpendicular from A to CD. If ∠M BC = 90◦ , compute tan ∠N BM .
Proposed by: Milan Haiman
120
Answer:
353
Construct P , the reflection of A over CD. Note that P , M , and B are collinear. As ∠P N C = ∠P BC =
90◦ , P N BC is cyclic. Thus, ∠N BM = ∠N CP , so our desired tangent is tan ∠ACN = CN AN
. Note that
1
N M = 2 AB = 64. Since 4AN D ∼ 4M AD,

255 ND
= .
64 + N D 255
AN 120 120
Solving, we find N D = 225, which gives AN = 120. Then we calculate CN = 128+225 = 353 .

10. An up-right path between two lattice points P and Q is a path from P to Q that takes steps of 1 unit
either up or to the right. A lattice point (x, y) with 0 ≤ x, y ≤ 5 is chosen uniformly at random. Compute
the expected number of up-right paths from (0, 0) to (5, 5) not passing through (x, y).
Proposed by: Mehtaab Sawnhey
Answer: 175
For a lattice point (x, y), let F (x, y) denote the number of up-right paths from (0, 0) to (5, 5) that don’t
pass through (x, y), and let X X
S= F (x, y).
0≤x≤5 0≤y≤5

S
Our answer is 36 ,as there are 36 lattice points (x, y) with 0 ≤ x, y ≤ 5.
Notice that the number of up-right paths from (0, 0) to (5, 5) is 10


5 = 252 because each path consists of
10 steps, of which we can choose 5 to be to the right. Each of these paths passes through 11 lattice points
(x, y) with 0 ≤ x, y ≤ 5, so each path contributes 36 − 11 = 25 to the quantity we are counting in S. Then
S = 25 · 252, so our answer is 25·252
36 = 175.