Find all periodic sequences of real numbers such that the following conditions hold for all :
Solution
Answer: The sequences satisfying the conditions of the problem are:
where and is any real number.
We rewrite the first condition as
If there exists a positive integer such that , then from equation (1) we have for all positive integers . By the fact that the sequence is periodic, we get for every positive integer . Thus the sequence is of the form for some .
Now suppose that for every positive integer . Let be the period of the sequence. From equation (1) we have
Combining with the second condition , we have . Using the AM-GM inequality we get
So the equality holds, and thus we get
which means that is a constant sequence. So all sequences satisfying the conditions of the problem are those listed above.
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