I was looking back over old Mathematical Olympiad questions, and I came across this question which seems to require very little mathematical insight as such to solve. It’s a very hard puzzle, but the skills needed to solve it aren’t that much different from the skills needed to solve the puzzles in the weekend newspapers. The puzzle is from day 1 of the 1989 Olympiad, and I’ve reworded it so as to make the terminology a little easier to follow.

Divide the numbers 1, 2, 3, …, 1988, 1989 into 117 sets of 17 numbers such that (a) each number appears in exactly one set and (b) the sum of the numbers in each set is the same.

For a solution, click here.