Determine all functions satisfying the conditions
for all real numbers and .
Solution
There is only one such function, that is .
Writing in (i) gives . As , .
Plugging in in (i) gives , that is . Again as , we obtain .
Then by (ii) we have (*).
By induction on we can show that for all non-negative integer .
By (*) applying induction on gives (**) for all real number and non-negative integer .
Let where and are positive integers. Then by (**) we have .
On the other hand by (i) and (**) we get .
The last two equations conclude that for all positive rational number .
Since both and are strictly increasing on and there exists a rational number in any interval, we can easily show that for every real number .
Using (*) and (iii) we can show that for all real number and it satisfies all three conditions.
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.