Suppose are real numbers such that and . Prove that
Solutions — 4
Solution 1
To begin with,
so that . Now we can prove the upper bound of zero. Suppose (for a contradiction) that a real triple satisfies the given constraints and . Then either
(i) all three of are positive, or
(ii) some two are negative and the other one is positive.
If (i) holds, then each of the products is positive, in which case , a contradiction. Say (ii) happens with . Then
a sum of five negative numbers equal to zero, also a contradiction. Thus (ii) can't occur either. The conclusion is that for all triples satisfying the given constraints.
Next, we will prove that . In any case, and , hence at most one of is negative. Suppose . Since, , therefore . Thus . But , so that , in which case . Hence, by AM-GM,
whence as desired.
Solution 2
First observe that . So .
Next observe that and satisfy the equation , that is . Since and (and hence ) are real, the quadratic has a non-negative discriminant so that . That reduces to and hence . So must satisfy . It follows immediately that , which proves the right side of the inequality.
Note that if , then AM-GM implies:
So which proves the left side of the inequality for these values of . In the remaining case, , we note that is an increasing function of on that range (an increasing function minus a decreasing function) and so is at most the value of that expression when , completing the proof.
Solution 3
Observing that
we obtain because we have from . Now we see that
where we set . We easily discover the root of and then the factorisation .
To show , we assume . This implies and , hence we cannot have and , i.e. at least one of is positive. Because and we have . This implies now that and and we can use AM-QM to get which leads to the contradiction . It follows that and so , as desired.
Solution 4
The plane intersects the unit sphere in a circle containing the points , , , and these three points divide the circle into arcs. At the three points, the inequalities are trivial. Except at these three points, we cannot have all three coordinates on these arcs non-negative, because as seen in Solution 1. In fact, exactly one coordinate is negative, since if , say, then the first equation implies , whence , contradicting the second equation. This shows, in particular, .
Let us assume, without loss of generality, that , so . We claim the point on the circle where is minimal equates and , that is . For the proof of minimality suppose , then and , while , contradicting the second equation. If we get and . Then we are in the equality case of the AM-QM inequality , hence .
Next we show for fixed satisfying that is maximised (and so is minimised) over the set when . Call the corresponding point .
To maximise inside the closed disc centred at the origin, intersected with the first quadrant, , we proceed as follows. It is easy to see that on any line of slope , i.e. for fixed , the maximum of occurs when . We then head out along the diagonal to the maximum at and see that the maximum of is equal to . In our situation, and so the minimum of (for fixed ) occurs at the point , and is equal to .
To find the minimum of for these points (now allowing to vary), we substitute to obtain
For we have and and therefore
Thus we have shown that the minimum of is obtained for , i.e. , and this corresponds to the point , where . This is the minimum over all that satisfy , , and . Earlier we showed that satisfies these conditions if it is a point on the arc mentioned above on which . By symmetry it follows that for all points considered in the problem.