Maths Olympiad Prep

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Algebra Difficulty 5.0 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:
Find all triples of continuous functions f,g,hf, g, h from R\mathbb{R} to R\mathbb{R} such that f(x+y)=g(x)+h(y)f(x+y) = g(x) + h(y) for all real numbers xx and yy.

Solution

Solution:
The answer is f(x)=cx+a+bf(x) = c x + a + b, g(x)=cx+ag(x) = c x + a, h(x)=cx+bh(x) = c x + b, where aa, bb, cc are real numbers. Obviously these solutions work, so we wish to show they are the only ones.

First, put y=0y = 0 to get f(x+0)=g(x)+h(0)f(x+0) = g(x) + h(0), so g(x)=f(x)h(0)g(x) = f(x) - h(0). Similarly, h(y)=f(y)g(0)h(y) = f(y) - g(0). Therefore, the functional equation boils down to f(x+y)=f(x)+f(y)(g(0)+h(0))f(x+y) = f(x) + f(y) - (g(0) + h(0)). By shifting and appealing to Cauchy's functional equation (with ff continuous) we get f(x)=cx+g(0)+h(0)f(x) = c x + g(0) + h(0), g(x)=cx+g(0)g(x) = c x + g(0) and h(x)=cx+h(0)h(x) = c x + h(0).

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.