Let be a sequence of positive integers, none of which can be written as the sum of (two or more) distinct other numbers in the sequence. For every integer with prove that .
Solution
For with and , we introduce the auxiliary value
We claim that these auxiliary values are all pairwise distinct: Let us assume that . Without loss of generality , so that this equality turns into
But then can be written as a sum of distinct other numbers in the sequence, unless and holds. Hence the auxiliary values indeed are distinct. As altogether there are auxiliary values, the largest value must be at least . This yields
Here we used , which follows as the sequence is increasing. The above inequality can be rewritten into
which immediately implies the desired inequality from the problem statement.
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