A natural number has the following property: For arbitrary real numbers satisfying both and for , there exists a partition of the set of these real numbers into pairwise disjoint subsets (some of which may be empty), such that the sum of the numbers in each subset is at most 1. Determine the smallest number with this property.
Solution
The smallest number with this property is .
We first show . For this we choose as well as . Then and since for all , subsets are needed here.
Now we show . For this we perform a case distinction according to .
For , each receives its own subset. Thus all subsets, some of which may be empty, are disjoint and have element sums of at most .
For , there must exist two numbers and with . Otherwise, already in the sum every bracket would be greater than and the sum of all would be greater than , contradiction! Thus we can replace and by and obtain a set with elements satisfying all conditions. This step can be repeated until the replacement yields a set with elements. For this set, and hence also for the original set, the desired partition exists. This proves everything.