USAMO

Algebra Difficulty 6.1 National Olympiad Find the answer

Given that $a,b,c,d,e$ are real numbers such that
$a+b+c+d+e=8$ ,
$a^2+b^2+c^2+d^2+e^2=16$ .
Determine the maximum value of $e$ .

Your answer

A number or a short expression. Fractions can be typed as 3/2, and spacing doesn't matter.

Solution

By Cauchy Schwarz, we can see that $(1+1+1+1)(a^2+b^2+c^2+d^2)\geq (a+b+c+d)^2$ thus $4(16-e^2)\geq (8-e)^2$ Finally, $e(5e-16) \geq 0$ which means $\frac{16}{5} \geq e \geq 0$ so the maximum value of $e$ is $\frac{16}{5}$ .
from: Image from Gon Mathcenter.net

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