A natural number has the following property:
For arbitrary real numbers , which both satisfy and for , there exists a partition of the set of these real numbers into pairwise disjoint subsets (some of which may be empty), such that the sum of the numbers in each subset is at most 1.
Determine the smallest number with this property.
Solution
The smallest number with this property is 4025.
We first show . For this, we choose and . Then and since for all , 4025 subsets are required.
Now we show . For this, we perform a case distinction based on .
For , each gets its own subset. Thus, all subsets, some of which may be empty, are disjoint and have sums of at most 1.
For , there must exist two numbers and such that . Otherwise, in the sum , each parenthesis would be greater than 1, and the sum of all would be greater than 2013, a contradiction! Therefore, we can replace and with and obtain a set with elements that satisfies all conditions. This step can be repeated until the replacement yields a set with 4025 elements. For this set, and thus also for the original set, the desired partition exists. This completes the proof.
Note: Some of the may indeed be equal; two subsets are then disjoint if they do not contain the same element (with respect to the numbering). The problem statement allowed for many solution paths.