Let be given. Show that there exist integers and , not all 0, such that the inequality is satisfied.
Prove furthermore that in every triple of integers for which this inequality holds, at least one of the absolute values is greater than .
Let be given. Show that there exist integers and , not all 0, such that the inequality is satisfied.
Prove furthermore that in every triple of integers for which this inequality holds, at least one of the absolute values is greater than .
Solution:
In the first proof of the first part, we denote for a real number let be the largest integer not greater than (floor function), the number is called the fractional part of .
We choose an integer . By the pigeonhole principle there exist distinct indices such that and lie in the same one of the intervals
Then there exists an integer such that holds. From this, by multiplying by , it follows for that the inequality holds, which with leads to the inequality in the problem statement.
The second proof gets by without the pigeonhole principle: Since , we find a positive integer such that . Evidently there exist integers , different from 0, such that . We now set , then we have .
For the (more difficult) second part of the problem, we assume that and satisfy the inequality. We first compute that the following expression is an integer.
This number is different from 0, for otherwise 60 would be the square of a rational number, which, however, due to the unique prime factorization of positive integers, is not the case. Thus holds. On the other hand, can be estimated from above as follows
where in the second step we used the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. After rearranging, the claim follows.