The Setup: A three-set counting problem that would be messy through full Inclusion-Exclusion. The elegant route is to notice the sets split by parity, which makes the awkward intersections vanish outright.
Step 1: Handle the even sets. Let be the multiples of 4 and the multiples of 6, over :
Their overlap is the multiples of - the LCM, not the product 24, since 4 and 6 share a factor of 2:
Step 2: Combine them.
Step 3: Count the odd set. Let be the odd multiples of 9, i.e. with odd and , so . The admissible are :
Step 4: Exploit disjointness. Every multiple of 4 is even and every multiple of 6 is even, so contains only even numbers. Every element of is , hence odd. A number cannot be both even and odd, so and the three-set Inclusion-Exclusion collapses to plain addition:
Step 5: A note on why the 'odd' restriction costs nothing. An *even* multiple of 9 is a multiple of 18, and since every such number already sits in . So the answer would be unchanged had the question said *a multiple of 9* instead - the restriction to odd multiples is what makes the sets disjoint and the counting clean, not what makes the total smaller.
Final Answer: 388