Let . For what positive values of do there exist distinct such that , is a rectangle?
Solution
Say we have four points on the curve which form a rectangle. If we interpolate a cubic through these points, that cubic will be symmetric around the center of the rectangle. But the unique cubic through the four points is , and has only one point of symmetry, the point So every rectangle with all four points on is of the form , and without loss of generality we let . Then for any choice of and these points form a parallelogram, which is a rectangle if and only if the distance from to is equal to the distance from to . Let , and consider restricted to . We are looking for all the values of such that has solutions other than . Note that where . This polynomial has a relative maximum of 1 at and a relative minimum of at . Thus the polynomial has the double root and factors as , the largest possible value of for which is , or . The smallest such value is that which evaluates to other than , which is similarly found to be , or . Thus, for in the range the equation has nontrivial solutions and hence an inscribed rectangle exists.