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Given 30 points in the plane no 3 of which are collinear, we color the segments formed by the pairs of these points red and blue such that: from every point there emerge 12 red segments and 17 blue segments. How many triangles that have all three sides of the same colour are there?

N.B. i think the phrasing of the problem is bad - the number of monochromatic triangles surely cannot be constant right? However it’s rather hard for me to construct two examples with a different number of triangles. Maybe the problem wanted the minimum number of such triangles

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    $\begingroup$ Your title says "12 blue segments and 19 (then 17) red segments from each point" while your question says " from every point there emerge 12 red segments and 17 blue segments". Your first edit still mixed up red and blue. When you edit your question to tidy this up, could you add what you have tried so far? $\endgroup$
    – Henry
    Commented Sep 6, 2021 at 13:45
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    $\begingroup$ This is more interesting than I thought at first. $\endgroup$
    – MJD
    Commented Sep 6, 2021 at 14:35
  • $\begingroup$ Look at this article by G. Lorden, Blue-empty chromatic graphs, Amer. Math. monthly 69 (1962) 114-119. $\endgroup$
    – kabenyuk
    Commented Sep 6, 2021 at 16:10
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    $\begingroup$ Lemma 1 in the linked paper implies that the number of monochromatic triangles is constant and equal to 1000. $\endgroup$
    – RobPratt
    Commented Sep 6, 2021 at 20:03
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    $\begingroup$ jstor.org/stable/pdf/… $\endgroup$
    – RobPratt
    Commented Sep 6, 2021 at 20:44

1 Answer 1

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Lemma 1 in the Lorden paper shows that if node $i$ has $r_i$ red incident edges and $n-1-r_i$ blue incident edges, the number of monochromatic triangles is $$\binom{n}{3}-\frac{1}{2}\sum_{i=1}^n r_i (n-1-r_i).$$ For $n=30$ and $r_i=12$ for all $i$, this formula yields $$\binom{30}{3}-\frac{30 \cdot 12 \cdot 17}{2} = 4060 - 3060 = 1000$$ monochromatic triangles

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