The 30 edges of a regular icosahedron are distinguished by labeling them . How many different ways are there to paint each edge red, white, or blue such that each of the 20 triangular faces of the icosahedron has two edges of the same color and a third edge of a different color?
Solution
The number of such colorings is . Identify the three colors red, white, and blue with (in some order) the elements of the field of three elements (i.e., the ring of integers mod 3). The set of colorings may then be identified with the space generated by the set of edges. Let be the set of faces, and let F; we may then define a linear transformation T: taking a coloring to the vector whose component corresponding to a given face equals the sum of the three edges of that face. The colorings we wish to count are the ones whose images under T consist of vectors with no zero components. We now show that T is surjective. (There are many possible approaches to this step; for instance, see the following remark.) Let be the dual graph of the icosahedron, that is, FF if they share an edge in the icosahedron. The graph admits a hamiltonian path, that is, there exists an ordering of the faces such that any two consecutive faces are adjacent in . For example, such an ordering can be constructed with being the five faces sharing a vertex of the icosahedron and being the five faces sharing the antipodal vertex. For e_if_if_{i+1}; these are obviously all distinct. By prescribing components for T in the components of . The vectors in obtained in this way thus form a 19-dimensional subspace; this subspace may also be described as the vectors for which the components of have the same sum as the components of . By performing a mirror reflection, we can construct a second hamiltonian path with the property that g_1 = f_1, g_2 = f_5, g_3 = f_4, g_4 = f_3, g_5 = f_2 which is contained in the image of . This implies that is surjective, as asserted earlier. Since is a surjective homomorphism from a 30-dimensional vector space to a 20-dimensional vector space, it has a 10-dimensional kernel. Each of the elements of with no zero components is then the image of exactly 3^{10}$ colorings of the desired form, yielding the result.