A sequence of real numbers satisfies the relation
Prove that this sequence is bounded, i.e., there is a constant such that for all positive integers .
Solutions — 2
Solution 1
Set . Denote
Clearly, the sequences and are nondecreasing. We need to prove that both are bounded.
Consider an arbitrary ; our first aim is to bound in terms of and .
i. There exist indices and such that and . Since , we have .
ii. On the other hand, choose an index such that . Then, we have
Summarizing (i) and (ii), we get
whence
Now, say that an index is lucky if . Two cases are possible.
Case 1. Assume that there exists a lucky index . In this case, (1) yields and . Therefore, and . So, the index is also lucky, and . Applying the same arguments repeatedly, we obtain that all indices are lucky (i.e., for all these indices), and for all such indices. Thus, all of the and are bounded by .
Case 2. Assume now that there is no lucky index, i.e., for all . Then (1) shows that for all we have , so for all . Since for all such indices, all of the and are bounded by .
Thus, in both cases the sequences and are bounded, as desired.
Solution 2
As in the previous solution, let . If the sequence is bounded above, say, by , then we have that for all , so the sequence is bounded. Assume for sake of contradiction that the sequence is not bounded above. Let , and . Call an index good if the following criteria hold:
We first show that there must be some good index . By assumption, we may take an index such that . Choose minimally such that . Now, the first condition in (2) is satisfied because of the minimality of , and the second and third conditions are satisfied because , and for every such that .
Let be a good index. We derive a contradiction. We have that
whenever .
We define the index to maximize over , and let . Then, we note that by the maximality of .
Assume first that . Then, we have that
because . But this contradicts our assumption that in the second criteria of (2).
Now assume that . Then, there exist some indices summing up to such that
But combining this with (3), we have
Because , we have that . But since each of the is less than , this contradicts the maximality of .