Maths Olympiad Prep

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Algebra Difficulty 5.3 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:
For how many positive integers n1000n \leq 1000 does the equation in real numbers
xx=n x^{\lfloor x\rfloor}=n
have a positive solution for xx? (For a real number xx, x\lfloor x\rfloor denotes the largest integer that is not greater than xx.)

Solution

Solution:
If x=0\lfloor x\rfloor=0, then xx=1=11x^{\lfloor x\rfloor}=1=1^{\lfloor 1\rfloor}, so we can safely ignore this case, as it does not introduce new solutions.
If x=k\lfloor x\rfloor=k for some k>0k>0, xxx=xkx \mapsto x^{\lfloor x\rfloor}=x^{k} is a continuous and increasing function on the interval [k,k+1)[k, k+1). Therefore, the xxx^{\lfloor x\rfloor} can take on any value in [kk,(k+1)k)\left[k^{k},(k+1)^{k}\right) when x=k\lfloor x\rfloor=k. Because 54<1000<555^{4}<1000<5^{5}, it suffices to count the number of integers in the interval [kk,(k+1)k)\left[k^{k},(k+1)^{k}\right) for 1k41 \leq k \leq 4.
Thus, the number of valid nn is simply
k=14(k+1)kkk=(21)+(94)+(6427)+(625256)=412 \sum_{k=1}^{4}(k+1)^{k}-k^{k}=(2-1)+(9-4)+(64-27)+(625-256)=412

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