Problem:
Determine all functions such that
holds for all real numbers and .
Problem:
Determine all functions such that
holds for all real numbers and .
Solution:
The functional equation has two solutions, and .
Setting and in the functional equation yields . So there is at least one zero point of . Let be any of them. Setting gives us . If , then is a constant function and we know that , so it is a zero function, which is indeed a solution.
It remains to investigate the case where is the only zero point of , i.e. if and only if . Furthermore, taking in the functional equation we obtain
If we prove an injectivity of , the previous identity yields , what is the second solution, as we can easily check.
Now we prove the injectivity of . Firstly, let us examine the set of the fixed points of . This set is non-empty because is one of its points. Assume that is any of the fixed points, i.e. . Setting in the functional equation gives
Now we set in the functional equation and we obtain using proved
This yields that is the only fixed point of .
Secondly, we choose so that , which yields . This can be done for each , since is the only fixed point of . This substitution gives us
In order to finish the proof of injectivity let us assume that non-zero real numbers satisfy . We have already proved that . The previous identity yields
and it follows that . The proof of the injectivity is thereby finished.
We set in the original equation and we obtain
which implies . This identity yields after setting in the original equation
Let us assume that there exists such that . For every real number we obtain by substitution in the original equation
This equation with (2) gives us for each real number , which is one of the solutions, as we can easily check.
Now we can assume that for every real number . For each real number and we obtain by putting in the original equation
We prove that the function is injective. If are numbers from such that then the substitutions or in the previous equation gives
This two equations directly yields to , which proves the injectivity.
The injectivity of the function together with (2) lead to what is the second solution, as we can check.