2013 USAJMO Problems/Problem 6
Solution with Thought Process
Without loss of generality, let . Then
.
Suppose x = y = z. Then , so
. It is easily verified that
has no solution in positive numbers greater than 1. Thus,
for x = y = z. We suspect if the inequality always holds.
Let x = 1. Then we have , which simplifies to
and hence
Let us try a few examples: if y = z = 2, we have
; if y = z, we have
, which reduces to
. The discriminant (16 - 20) is negative, so in fact the inequality is strict. Now notice that yz - y - z + 3 = (y-1)(z-1) + 2. Now we see we can let
! Thus,
and the claim holds for x = 1.
If x > 1, we see the will provide a huge obstacle when squaring. But, using the identity
:
which leads to
Again, we experiment. If x = 2, y = 3, and z = 3, then
.
Now, we see the finish: setting gives
. We can solve a quadratic in u! Because this problem is a #6, the crown jewel of USAJMO problems, we do not hesitate in computing the messy computations:
Because the coefficient of is positive, all we need to do is to verify that the discriminant is nonpositive:
<prove that discriminant is negative>
Success! The discriminant is negative. Thus, we can replace our claim with a strict one, and there are to the original equation in the hypothesis.
--Thinking Process by suli