lattice points are drawn on the coordinate plane. These points' pairwise midpoints are then drawn. What is the smallest possible value of such that one is guaranteed to have at least of the midpoints also be lattice points?
Details and Assumptions
This problem is inspired by a classic proof problem.
If two pairs of points happen to have a common midpoint, both midpoints should be counted.
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Let a , b , c , d be the number of points that are ( x , y ) = ( 0 , 0 ) , ( 0 , 1 ) , ( 1 , 0 ) , ( 1 , 1 ) m o d 2 , respectively.
We know that a + b + c + d = n . Also, note that among the points in a , b , c or d , we can pick any two from one group and have the midpoint be a lattice point. If a group has x points, then we can pick 2 x ( x − 1 ) pairs. Each of these pairs will give a midpoint that is a lattice point.
So let f ( x ) = 2 x ( x − 1 ) . We know that a + b + c + d = n and we want to make sure f ( a ) + f ( b ) + f ( c ) + f ( d ) ≥ 2 0 1 4 . Thus, we want to make sure that f ( a ) + f ( b ) + f ( c ) + f ( d ) is at its minimum.
By Jensen's Inequality, 4 f ( a ) + f ( b ) + f ( c ) + f ( d ) ≥ f ( 4 a + b + c + d ) = f ( 4 n )
Thus, f ( a ) + f ( b ) + f ( c ) + f ( d ) ≥ 4 f ( 4 n ) = 8 n ( n − 4 )
We want the minimum to exceed 2 0 1 4 , so we let 8 n ( n − 4 ) ≥ 2 0 1 4 . Solving gives n ≥ 1 2 8 . 9 4 9 so the minimum possible integer value of n is 1 2 9 .