The Fifty-Eighth William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition Saturday, December 6, 1997

, has sides and A1 A rectangle, . A triangle has as the intersection of the altitudes, the center of the circumscribed circle, the midpoint of , and the foot of the altitude from . What is the length of ? each has a single penny. Player 1 passes a penny to player 2, who then passes two pennies to player 3. Player 3 then passes one penny to Player 4, who passes two pennies to Player 5, and so on, players alternately passing one penny or two to the next player who still has some pennies. A player who runs out of pennies drops out of the game and leaves the table. Find an innite set of numbers for which some player ends up with all pennies.

     are seated around a table, and A2 Players 

B1 Let denote the distance between the real number and the nearest integer. For each positive integer , evaluate

n %po

(Here

  A3 Evaluate "! ( * . %)-0, / & .-0%)/ 1 -23* ---4 # $%'& %)+  5 *  %)-6 / *  -%) / 7 -2 * ---84:9 %  $ * %) 5 5 5 5 5 5 A4 Let ; be a group with identity < and =?>@;BAC; a function such that =EDGFIHJ=EDGF J=EDGF J =KDMLNHJ=EDML J=EDOL J 5 < ( L H L L . Prove 5 ( that there whenever F H F F 5 ( PRQS; such5 that ( TD % J P=ED % J exists an element T.D % J8TD U J for all is a homomorphism (i.e. TD %U J ). V Q ; % U  -tuples of posiA5 Let WX denote the number of ordered ^        Z   DYP H P P[X\J such that # ] P H * _] P * tive  * integers ^] P X ` 5 5 . Determine whether WaH is even or odd.  A6 For a positive integered and any number b d , dene ,real # recursively by , and for fhg , H %Nc % %  b H D f\J  % cji 5 %cji & f * & %c  and then take b to be the largest value for which Fix k d  l lm % X i H . Find % c in terms of and f , f .

D% J *  D % J &@% FD % JD % J  where F D % J"g d for all real % . Prove that D % J is bounded.  X _] the sum sut H B3 For each positive integer , write ~ ] | in the form X X , where X and  X are relatively prime positive integers. Determine all such that 5 does not divide X . X B4 Let P s X denotes the coefcient of % in the expansion d of D * % * %)5 J . Prove that for all [integers] fhg , dal+r M D J P q lk
 t# & c   B5 Prove that for g ,  terms  terms & 0 j   D  J 50 5 vx
B6 The dissection of the 345 triangle shown below (into four congruent right triangles similar to the original) has diameter . Find the least diameter of a dissection of this triangle into four parts. (The diameter of a dissection is the least upper bound of the distances between pairs of points belonging to the same part.)

B2 Let be a twice-differentiable real-valued function satisfying

vxwy

X 7 r Xq H D{n}2~  n    | | J o o sut HKvxwzy DOP  J denotes the minimum of P and .)

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