Pinning evenly fragmented papers

38 Views Asked by At

Draw traces along two identical papers arbitrarily so that each one is divided into $k$ parts of the same size. Place $k$ pins through them with their boundaries coincided. Show that there exists a certain placement of the pins so that when the papers break apart along the traces drawn on them, each fragment has at least one pin through it.

enter image description here

I hope the question is clear enough with this picture.

I thought that since I have no idea how the paper was divided, I'd better consider it as a graph-theory problem instead of a combinatoric geometry problem.

So I construct graph with $2k$ vertices $a_1,\ldots,a_k;b_1,\ldots,b_k$ representing the fragments. Construct sides between fragments which have common area. If this can be proven:

There exists a one-one mapping between $\{a_1,\ldots,a_k\}$ and $\{b_1,\ldots,b_k\}$ so that each mapped pair are connected.

The problem would be solved.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On BEST ANSWER

Consider the bipartite graph $G$ on $k+k$ vertices where each vertex represents a fragment and each edge connects two overlapping fragments (one in each sheet). Since all fragments are the same size, given any subset $S$ of fragments in sheet $1$ with cardinality $n$, at least $n$ fragments in sheet $2$ are needed to completely overlap $S$.

Hall's marriage theorem and the symmetric argument with respect to swapping sheets together guarantee a perfect matching in $G$. For each edge in such a matching you push a pin; after splitting the fragments, all of them are guaranteed to have been pierced by a pin as required.