IMC 2015 · Problem 8

Day 222nd IMC · Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria

Statement

Consider all 262626^{26} words of length 26 in the Latin alphabet. Define the weight of a word as 1/(k+1)1/(k+1), where kk is the number of letters not used in this word. Prove that the sum of the weights of all words is 3753^{75}.

Official solution

Hidden so you can work on the problem first.

Proposed by Fedor Petrov, St. Petersburg State University.