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Algebra Difficulty 3.8 AMC 10/12 Find the answer Italy

Problem:
How many triples (a,b,c)(a, b, c) of real numbers satisfy the following system?
{a2+b2+c2=1a3+b3+c3=1 \left\{\begin{array}{l} a^{2}+b^{2}+c^{2}=1 \\ a^{3}+b^{3}+c^{3}=1 \end{array}\right.

Pick one

Solution

Solution:
a2+b2+c2=1a^{2}+b^{2}+c^{2}=1 and therefore a1|a| \leq 1. This implies that a3a3a2a^{3} \leq |a|^{3} \leq a^{2}, where equality holds if and only if a=0a=0 or a=1a=1. The same reasoning applies to bb and cc. Therefore if one of the three numbers were different from 0 and from 1, we would have
1=a3+b3+c3<a2+b2+c2=1, 1=a^{3}+b^{3}+c^{3}<a^{2}+b^{2}+c^{2}=1,
which is absurd. Consequently two of the unknowns must be equal to 0 and one equal to 1. Therefore there exist three solutions, corresponding to the three possible choices of the unknown to be set equal to 1.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from it; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.