Find all pairs of real numbers such that the inequality
holds for side lengths of any triangle.
Solution
Assume that for some , the given inequality holds for all side lengths of any triangle. Plugging in and arbitrary , we get . If then we easily find sufficiently small that makes the inequality false. Hence and likewise .
Let be a triangle in the coordinate plane. Without loss of generality, let , , and denote (). Using Pythagorean Theorem we express the side lengths in terms of and plug it in the given inequality to obtain
which rewrites as
This inequality has to hold for any and any . However, varying , the right-hand side attains all negative values (recall ). Therefore for any we have
which happens if and only if the discriminant is not positive. The inequality rewrites to .
We found out that if numbers satisfy the given inequality for any triplet of side lengths of a triangle then , and
On the other hand, the conjunction of these three conditions is also sufficient: The third condition implies that (2) is satisfied for any real and since the right-hand side of (1) is negative for , inequality (1) is satisfied for any and any . Finally, inequality (1) is equivalent to the given inequality.