Problem:
How many triples of real numbers satisfy the following system?
Pick one
Solution
Solution:
and therefore . This implies that , where equality holds if and only if or . The same reasoning applies to and . Therefore if one of the three numbers were different from 0 and from 1, we would have
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.
Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track
puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.