2010 UNCO Math Contest II Problems/Problem 10

Problem

Let $S=\left\{1,2,3,\cdots ,n\right\}$ where $n \ge 4$ . What is the maximum number of elements in a subset $A$ of $S$ , which has at least three elements, such that $a+b>c$ for all $a, b, c$ in $A$ ? As an example, the subset $A=\left \{2,3,4\right \}$ of $S=\left\{1,2,3,4,5 \right\}$ has the property that the sum of any two elements is strictly bigger than the third element, but the subset $\left \{2,3,4,5 \right \}$ does not since $2+3$ is $\underline{not}$ greater than $5$ . Since there is no subset of size $4$ satisfying these conditions, the answer for $n=5$ is $3$ .

Solution

 if  is even;   if  is odd.

2010 UNCO Math Contest II (Problems • Answer Key • Resources)
Preceded by Problem 9	Followed by Problem 11
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2010 UNCO Math Contest II Problems/Problem 10

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