Problem:
The sets and have the following property: every element of is either an element of or the sum of two (possibly identical) elements of . Find the minimum value of .
Problem:
The sets and have the following property: every element of is either an element of or the sum of two (possibly identical) elements of . Find the minimum value of .
Solution:
The elements of give sums of the required kind (with two different summands, two equal summands or one summand, respectively). Therefore , whence .
If every element of has a unique representation. This consecutively implies and now has two representations, a contradiction. Therefore .
Assume that has the required property and . Since and have unique representations, we have and . Also, it is easy to see that and . The only two possible representations of are and therefore or .
Case 1. . It follows from that . Then checking all possibilities for we see that , which contradicts to the above restriction .
Case 2. . As in case 1 we conclude that . On the other hand by we have and therefore . Now using we see that the only possibility for is . This implies that and , i.e. . But this set does not have the required property.
The set has cardinality and possesses the required property. Therefore the minimum value of is .