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Algebra Difficulty 6.1 National olympiad Find the answer

Determine the smallest real constant CC with the following property:
For any five arbitrary positive real numbers a1,a2,a3,a4,a5a_{1}, a_{2}, a_{3}, a_{4}, a_{5}, which do not necessarily have to be distinct, there always exist pairwise different indices i,j,k,li, j, k, l such that
aiajakalC\left|\frac{a_{i}}{a_{j}}-\frac{a_{k}}{a_{l}}\right| \leq C holds.

A number or a short expression. Spacing and $ signs are ignored.

Solution

The desired value is C=12C=\frac{1}{2}.
First, we prove that C12C \leq \frac{1}{2}. To do this, we assume without loss of generality (oBdA) that a1a2a3a4a5a_{1} \leq a_{2} \leq a_{3} \leq a_{4} \leq a_{5} and consider the five fractions a1a2,a3a4,a1a5,a2a3,a4a5\frac{a_{1}}{a_{2}}, \frac{a_{3}}{a_{4}}, \frac{a_{1}}{a_{5}}, \frac{a_{2}}{a_{3}}, \frac{a_{4}}{a_{5}}. By the pigeonhole principle, at least three of these fractions lie in one of the intervals ]0, 12\frac{1}{2} ] or ]12,1]\left.] \frac{1}{2}, 1\right]. Among these, two fractions are consecutive in the list or the first and the last fraction are included. In any case, the positive difference between these two fractions is less than 12\frac{1}{2}, and the four involved indices are pairwise distinct.
Now we show that C12C \geq \frac{1}{2}. For this, consider the example 1, 2, 2, 2, rr, where rr is a very large number. With these numbers, we can form the fractions 1r,2r,12,22,21,r2,r1\frac{1}{r}, \frac{2}{r}, \frac{1}{2}, \frac{2}{2}, \frac{2}{1}, \frac{r}{2}, \frac{r}{1}, ordered by size. According to the problem statement, 1r\frac{1}{r} and 2r\frac{2}{r} cannot both be chosen. Therefore, the smallest positive difference is 122r\frac{1}{2}-\frac{2}{r}, which approaches the value 12\frac{1}{2} from below as rr \rightarrow \infty. \square

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Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.