Let , and be real numbers in the interval . Prove that
Solution
Lemma. Let and be real numbers. If for all real numbers and , we have
then we have
Proof. Clearly, . If , then it is easy to see that , thus (2) holds. Thus we may assume .
Since the left-hand side of (1) is quadratic in the variable , its discriminant is non-positive, i.e., . Hence
Again, its left-hand side is quadratic in and so its discriminant is non-positive:
This proves the claim.
By the Lemma, it suffices to show that for any real numbers and , we have
Using the summation formula of geometric series we obtain that the left side of the inequality equals
which is clearly non-negative.
The equality holds if and only if there exist real numbers such that for any . So the equality holds if and only if two of are equal.
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