For an integer and real numbers and , show the following inequality.
Solutions — 3
Solution 1
It suffices to prove the following.
By replacing by in the above equation and adding up for , we can obtain our desired result. Let
and consider
where is integer. (We consider any indices as modulo , so that holds for every integers .) We can observe
and obtain the following as its result:
Meanwhile we have
so for any we have
If is even then we let to obtain
and if is odd then we let to obtain
In any cases, we have
thus proving our inequality.
Solution 2
We will show the following inequality as in the Solution 1.
Let be the average of all . Then above is equivalent to:
By noting the following (follows from AM-GM)
it suffices to prove
We let
and we will obtain bounds for both sides using .
Lemma 4. We have
Proof. Both sides of the equation are invariant under adding same constant to all , so it suffices to show when . In that case, we can show:
Lemma 5. We have
Proof. Let be the maximum and minimum among respectively, and assume without loss of generality. Using the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality we have
and similarly
Thus we have (the last part uses AM-HM)
Combining those two lemmas yield the desired result of
Solution 3
We note that if then the left hand side (of our original inequality) becomes zero so our problem holds obviously. In this solution, we will prove the following inequality of the Solution 1 for .
We will consider sum of the following two inequalities.
The first one follows easily from AM-GM. For the second one, we consider a -gon whose vertices have coordinates . Then we can interpret its the left hand and righthand sides as two times its (signed) area and the sum of squares of its sides respectively. By considering the isoperimetric inequality for -gon and Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, one can show their ratio is maximized for regular -gon, so it suffices to check equality holds for regular -gon case.
Summing those two gives
so it suffices to show
for . When , we use and to show
For and , we can prove it by explicitly calculating . (, )
Remark. The 'optimal constant' for this inequality can be given as
instead of . Consider a vector space and an operator on defined as . Then our inequality can be expressed as follows. (The absolute value denotes the ordinary Euclidean length induced from )
The operator on is orthogonal, and it can be diagonalized by complex orthogonal basis () as (). Thus is invertible, and we can express the above inequality as follows. ()
One can see that can be given as the operator norm of . As is normal operator, its operator norm is given as maximum of absolute value of its eigenvalues . One can observe that this obtains maximum when or .