Problem:
Let and be two non-empty subsets of with . Let be the product of all elements of and let be the product of all elements of . Find the minimum and maximum possible value of and find all possible equality cases.
Solutions — 2
Solution 1
Solution:
For the maximum, we use the fact that , to get that . Equality holds if and only if or .
For the minimum observe, first that . Without loss of generality let . In this case . We write and consider the function for . Since
then is decreasing for .
Since is an integer and cannot be equal with , the minimum is attained to the closest integer to . We have and the closest integer which can be a product of elements of is .
Therefore the minimum is and it is achieved for example for , .
Suppose now that there are different sets and such that . Then the pairs of numbers and have the same sum and the same product, thus the equality case is unique for the numbers and . It remains to find all possible subsets with product . It is immediate that and from here it is easy to see that all possibilities are and .
Solution 2
Solution:
We have . Since is an integer, we have . One can then follow the approach of the first solution to find all equality cases.