TITLE: How many acute triangles can be formed by 100 points in a plane?
QUESTION [10 upvotes]: Given 100 points in the plane, no three of which are on the same line, consider all triangles that have all their vertices chosen from the 100 given points.
Prove that at most 70% of those triangles are acute-angled.

REPLY [8 votes]: This is from the 1970 International Mathematical Olympiad. You can find the questions here, and the (rather easy) solution to this question here.
It was one of the homework questions for aspirants to the British team for IMO 1978 in Bucharest. I managed to prove an explicit upper bound on the maximum possible proportion of triangles in $n$ points that tends to $2/3$ as $n$ tends to $\infty$. I can't remember what it was, but it is not too hard to work out, using the process described in the following paragraphs.
The proof of the simpler question goes like this: first prove geometrically that every $4$-set (i.e. set of $4$ points) must contain a non-acute triangle, so that at most $75$% of triangles in a $4$-set can be acute. Then argue combinatorially that if you have shown that at most a proportion $p$ of triangles in an $n$-set can be acute, it follows that at most a proportion $p$ of the triangles in an $(n+1)$-set can be acute.
So we immediately get that at most $7\frac12$ of the $10$ triangles in a $5$-set can be acute; and because the number of acute triangles must be an integer, we can bring this down to $7$ out of $10$, i.e. $70$%.
But there is no reason to stop there. The same process gains nothing when passing to $6$-sets, because $70$% of $20$ is an integer; but passing to $7$-sets gives us $70$% of $35$, which is $24\frac12$, which we can bring down to $24$.
So we can define an integer sequence $(s_i)$ by $s_4 = 3$, and $s_{i+1} = \left\lfloor \dfrac{(i+1)s_i}{i-2}\right\rfloor$. This gives us an upper bound on the maximum possible number of acute triangles in an $n$-set. I seem to remember that it is a cubic in $n$, whose exact form depends on $n$ mod $3$. And the proportion $s_n/\binom{n}{3}$ tends to $2/3$.
Note that $s_n$ is not necessarily the maximum possible number of acute triangles in an $n$-set. It just gives us an upper bound. In fact I think that this upper bound can't be attained for large enough $n$ ($n > 6$ perhaps?). I played around with this a bit, but after all it was $37$ years ago, so the details are blurred.