1983 IMO Problems/Problem 6
Problem 6
Let ,
and
be the lengths of the sides of a triangle. Prove that
.
Determine when equality occurs.
Solution 1
By Ravi substitution, let ,
,
. Then, the triangle condition becomes
. After some manipulation, the inequality becomes:
.
By Cauchy, we have:
with equality if and only if
. So the inequality holds with equality if and only if x = y = z. Thus the original inequality has equality if and only if the triangle is equilateral.
Solution 2
Without loss of generality, let . By Muirhead or by AM-GM, we see that
.
If we can show that , we are done, since then we can divide both sides of the inequality by
, and
.
We first see that, , so
.
Factoring, this becomes . This is the same as:
.
Expanding and refactoring, this is equal to . (This step makes more sense going backwards.)
Expanding this out, we have
,
which is the desired result.