2013 AMC 12B Problems/Problem 17
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[hide]Problem
Let and be real numbers such that
What is the difference between the maximum and minimum possible values of ?
Solution 1
. Now, by Cauchy-Schwarz, we have that . Therefore, we have that . We then find the roots of that satisfy equality and find the difference of the roots. This gives the answer, .
Solution 2
This is similar to the first solution but is far more intuitive. From the given, we have This immediately suggests use of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. By Cauchy, we have Substitution of the above results and some algebra yields This quadratic inequality is easily solved, and it is seen that equality holds for and .
The difference between these two values is .
Solution 3
(no Cauchy-Schwarz)
From the first equation, we know that . We substitute this into the second equation to find that This simplifies to , which we can write as the quadratic . We wish to find real values for and that satisfy this equation. Therefore, the discriminant is nonnegative. Hence, or . This factors as . Therefore, , and by symmetry this must be true for and as well.
Now and satisfy both equations, so we see that must be the minimum possible value of . Also, and satisfy both equations, so we see that is the maximum possible value of . The difference between these is , or .
Solution 4
We take a geometrical approach.
From the given, we have and . The first equation is a line with x and y intercepts of and the second equation is a circle centered at the origin with radius . Intuitively, if we want to find the minimum / maximum such that there still exist real solutions, the two graphs of the equations should be tangent.
Thus, we have that , which simplifies to . Solving the quadratic, we get that the values of for which the two graphs are tangent are and . Thus, our answer is .
Solution 5
Draw the sphere and the plane represented by the two equations in Cartesian space, with the -axis representing . The intersection between the sphere and plane are a circle. We wish to find the point on the circle where is minimized and the point where is maximized. Looking at the graph, it is clear by symmetry that when is maximized or minimized. Thus, we can set . This gives us the following system of equations:
Solving gives , which are the maximum and minimum values of respectively. The answer follows from here.
See also
2013 AMC 12B (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | |
Preceded by Problem 16 |
Followed by Problem 18 |
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