HMMT November 2018 #0k20

HMMT November 2018Hard

From module Telescoping Sums and Products

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Understand the scale

Scale 0.5: Easiest math competition problems, often solvable even for early middle school students without experience. 1: Problems strictly for beginners, often at a moderate middle school level. 1.5: Problems for stronger beginner students, on the level of the middling problems in most middle school contests. 2: For motivated beginners, harder questions from the previous categories. 2.5: More advanced beginner problems, hardest questions from previous categories. 3: Early intermediate problems that require more creative thinking. 3.5: Tougher early intermediate problems that consistently stretch into higher-level creative thinking or conceptual knowledge. 4: Intermediate-level problems. 4.5: Upper intermediate problems approaching the upper bound for non-invitational sprint math competitions. 5: More difficult AIME problems or simple proof-based Olympiad-style problems. 6: High-level AIME-styled questions or introductory Olympiad-level questions. 7: Tougher Olympiad-level questions, may require more technical knowledge. 8: High-level Olympiad-level questions. 9: Expert Olympiad-level questions. 9.5: The hardest problems appearing on Olympiads which the strongest students could reasonably solve. 10: Historically notorious problems, generally unsuitable for even very hard competitions because they are exceedingly tedious, long, and difficult.

Recurrence relationsTelescoping series

Problem

Problem:

Pascal has a triangle. In the $n$ th row, there are $n+1$ numbers $a_{n, 0}, a_{n, 1}, a_{n, 2}, \ldots, a_{n, n}$ where $a_{n, 0}=a_{n, n}=1$ . For all $1 \leq k \leq n-1$ , $a_{n, k}=a_{n-1, k}-a_{n-1, k-1}$ . What is the sum of all numbers in the 2018th row?

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