2010 AMC 12A Problems/Problem 13
Contents
Problem
For how many integer values of do the graphs of
and
not intersect?
Solution 1
The image below shows the two curves for . The blue curve is
, which is clearly a circle with radius
, and the red curve is a part of the curve
.
In the special case the blue curve is just the point
, and as
, this point is on the red curve as well, hence they intersect.
The case is symmetric to
: the blue curve remains the same and the red curve is flipped according to the
axis. Hence we just need to focus on
.
Clearly, on the red curve there will always be points arbitrarily far from the origin: for example, as approaches 0,
approaches
. Hence the red curve intersects the blue one if and only if it contains a point whose distance from the origin is at most
.
At this point we can guess that on the red curve the point where is always closest to the origin, and skip the rest of this solution.
For an exact solution, fix and consider any point
on the red curve. Its distance from the origin is
. To minimize this distance, it is enough to minimize
. By the Arithmetic Mean-Geometric Mean Inequality we get that this value is at least
, and that equality holds whenever
, i.e.,
.
Now recall that the red curve intersects the blue one if and only if its closest point is at most from the origin. We just computed that the distance between the origin and the closest point on the red curve is
. Therefore, we want to find all positive integers
such that
.
Clearly the only such integer is , hence the two curves are only disjoint for
and
.
This is a total of
values.
Solution 2
From the graph shown above, we see that there is a specific point closest to the center of the circle. Using some logic, we realize that as long as said furthest point is not inside or on the graph of the circle. This should be enough to conclude that the hyperbola does not intersect the circle.
Therefore, for each value of k, we only need to check said value to determine intersection. Let said point, closest to the circle have coordinates derived from the equation. Then, all coordinates that satisfy
intersect the circle.
Squaring, we find
After multiplying through by
and rearranging, we find
.
We see this is a quadratic in
and consider taking the determinant, which tells us that solutions are real when, after factoring:
We plot this inequality on the number line to find it is satisfied for all values except:
.
We then eliminate 0 because it is extraneous as both
and
are points which coincide.
Therefore, there are a total of
values.
Solution 3 (Algebra)
Since , multiply the equation by 2 on both sides to get
. Now we can add the two equations to get
, for which the only value of
that does not satisfy the equation is
, as that makes the RHS negative. Similarly, if we subtract the two equations, we obtain
, for which the only value of
that does not satisfy the equation is
, for the same reason above.
Thus, the only values are , giving us a total of
values.
~ ccx09 (Roy Short)
Solution 4 (Quick)
Multiply by and substitute it into
. Then,
. Recognize it? It's also
. The minimum of this function (more accurately the minimum absolute value of the function) is k=2, -2 (when x=y or x=-y). As long as k>2 or k<-2, the function is valid. As such,
. Elegant, huh?
~~BJHHar
Solution 5
Assume that since if
works then
also works. Let
and
. Then the given equations become
and
, which we don't want to intersect. The points that are the closest on this graph are
and
. We don't want the hyperbola to intersect or go inside the circle, so we require
, so
. Also, by symmetry
also works.Obviously
doesn't work, so we can discard that, leaving
integral solutions for
Solution 6(Algebra)
To know when the system does not intersect, we first need to find when they do intersect. To do so, we substitute into
giving:
By Simon's Favorite Factoring Trick, we get
Notice that other than for and/or
equal to
and/or
because for any
or
we can get some coordinates that work even if they're fractions which through
it can become an integer as
This means we have to exclude or
. This is
values that do not work.
~Batmanstark
Solution 7 (Trig)
The first equation is describing a circle with radius centered at
, so we can rewrite it in terms of a new variable
:
A quick check shows that this identity holds since . Now, with an alternate expression for
and
, we can plug this into the second equation to get:
Since the two equations does intersect when at
, we do not need to consider the
case, so we can safely both sides by
to get:
We can see that the intersections of these two equations will remain unchanged, only now that the solutions will be in terms of and
. Because the range of both
and
are limited to
, the range of
will not exceed
. However, the only way that the product could equal 1 is if both
and
to equal 1 at the same time, so since the maxima of the functions don't match up, this is an impossible case. Therefore, this equation will only have valid solutions when
, not at
.
For all , symmetry about the
-axis will give an identical argument with the equation
, with
producing valid solutions for our system. Then, the only two values of
such that the system of equations won't intersect are
and
, a total of
values.
(Note: In the graph of , the range of the function is actually even more restricted, being
. However, in a contest, observing that the value of
would suffice since the question is only asking for integer values of
.)
~chz3369
Video Solution 1 by SpreadTheMathLove
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YwShc-9n-4
2010 AMC 12A (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | |
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