Solve for : .
Solution
This problem can be done without needless casework. (For negative values of , the left hand side will be negative, so we only need to consider positive values of .) The key observation is that for is an extremely large value for the expression. Indeed, we observe that: . So the expression can only be as large as 122 if ALL of those equalities hold (the the fourth line equaling 40 isn't good enough), and . Note that this value is extremely close to 3. We may check that this value of indeed works. Note that the expression is strictly increasing in , so is the only value that works.
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