Let be the set of positive real numbers. Find all functions such that, for every , there exists a unique satisfying
Solutions — 4
Solution 1
First we prove that the function satisfies the condition of the problem statement. The AM-GM inequality gives
for every , with equality if and only if . This means that, for every , there exists a unique such that
namely .
Let now be a function that satisfies the condition of the problem statement. We say that a pair of positive real numbers is good if . Observe that if is good, then so is .
Lemma 1.0. If is good, then .
Proof. Assume that there exist positive real numbers such that is good. The uniqueness assumption says that is the unique positive real number such that is good. In particular, is not a good pair. This means that
and thus . Similarly, is a good pair, so is not a good pair, which implies . We apply the AM-GM inequality to obtain
This is a contradiction, since is a good pair.
By assumption, for any , there always exists a good pair containing , however Lemma 1 implies that the only good pair that can contain is , so
for every .
Solution 1.1. We give an alternative way to prove that assuming for every .
Indeed, if then for every with (and there are at least two of them), we have
Hence is a good pair for every such , a contradiction. We conclude that .
Solution 1.2. We can also conclude from Lemma 1 and as follows.
Lemma 2. The function is decreasing.
Proof. Let . Lemma 1 says that is not a good pair, but is. Hence
where we used (and ) in the last inequality. This implies that , showing that is decreasing.
We now prove that for all . Fix a value of and note that for we must have (using that is decreasing for the first step), hence . The last inequality is true for every . If we fix and look for the supremum of the expression over all , we get
Since we already know that , we conclude that .
Solution 2
As in the first solution, we note that is a solution, and we set out to prove that it is the only one. We write for the unique positive real number such that is a good pair. In this solution, we prove Lemma 2 without assuming Lemma 1.
Lemma 2. The function is decreasing.
Proof. Consider . It holds that . Moreover, because is the only positive real number such that is a good pair and , we have . Combining these two inequalities yields
or . Because and are both positive while is negative, it follows that , showing that is decreasing.
We now prove Lemma 1 using Lemma 2. Suppose that but . As in the first solution, we get and , which implies . Now
implies , which contradicts the fact that is decreasing. So is the unique such that is a good pair, and in particular we have .
We can now conclude the proof as in any of the Solutions 1.x.
Solution 3
As in the other solutions we verify that the function is a solution. We first want to prove the following lemma:
Lemma 3. For all we actually have (that is: the inequality is actually an equality).
Proof. We proceed by contradiction: Assume there exists some number such that for we have . Then for any we have, by uniqueness of , that . Therefore
Furthermore, for every such we have and (since . This gives us the two inequalities
Combining these two inequalities and rearranging the terms leads to the inequality
Moreover combining with the inequality (1) we obtain
.
We now reach the desired contradiction, since for sufficiently small we have that the left hand side is positive while the right hand side is negative.
With this lemma it then follows that for all we have
since for we have equality and by uniqueness for the inequality is strict.
In particular for every and for we have , or equivalently for all . With this inequality we obtain for all
where the first inequality comes from the problem statement. Consequently each of these inequalities must actually be an equality, and in particular we obtain for all .
Solution 4
Again, let us prove that is the only solution. Let again be the unique positive real number such that is a good pair.
Lemma 4. The function is strictly convex.
Proof. Consider the function for some real number . If is not strictly convex, then there exist and such that
Hence
Let and consider the case . For that particular choice of , the function has a unique minimum at . However, since , it must hold or , a contradiction.
Lemma 5. The function is continuous.
Proof. Since is strictly convex and defined on an open interval, it is also continuous.
As in Solution 1, we can prove that . If , then we consider the function which is continuous. Since , there exist at least two distinct such that giving that is good pair for both values of , a contradiction. We conclude that as desired.