Problem:
Let be a positive integer. Prove that given any angles , such that their sum is degrees, there exists a convex -gon having exactly those angles, in that order.
Problem:
Let be a positive integer. Prove that given any angles , such that their sum is degrees, there exists a convex -gon having exactly those angles, in that order.
Solution:
We induct on . The statement holds trivially for , as all triangles are convex.
Now, suppose that the statement is true for , where . Let be angles less than whose sum equals degrees. The statement is clearly true if and since we can easily form a parallelogram, so assume otherwise.
I claim that there exist two adjacent angles whose sum is greater than . Assume otherwise. Then, we have for , where . Summing these inequalities over all yields , which is equivalent to . Of course, we can have if and only if we have equality in each of the above inequalities, forcing us to have a parallelogram contrary to our assumption.
Hence, we have two adjacent angles with sum greater than . Without loss of generality, let these angles be and , relabeling if necessary. By the inductive hypothesis, we may construct an -gon with angles , as these angles are each less than and their sum equals degrees. Consider the vertex with angle . Note that we can "clip off" a triangle with angles , and at this vertex, yielding an -gon with the desired angles, completing the inductive step.