1984 USAMO Problems/Problem 2

Problem

The geometric mean of any set of $m$ non-negative numbers is the $m$ -th root of their product.

$\quad (\text{i})\quad$ For which positive integers $n$ is there a finite set $S_n$ of $n$ distinct positive integers such that the geometric mean of any subset of $S_n$ is an integer?

$\quad (\text{ii})\quad$ Is there an infinite set $S$ of distinct positive integers such that the geometric mean of any finite subset of $S$ is an integer?

Solution

a) We claim that for any numbers $p_1$ , $p_2$ , ... $p_n$ , $p_1^{n!}, p_2^{n!}, ... p_n^{n!}$ will satisfy the condition, which holds for any number $n$ .

Since $\sqrt[n] ab = \sqrt[n] a * \sqrt[n] b$ , we can separate each geometric mean into the product of parts, where each part is the $k$ th root of each member of the subset and the subset has $k$ members.

Assume our subset has $k$ members. Then, we know that the $k$ th root of each of these members is an integer (namely $p^{n!/k}$ ), because $k \leq n$ and thus $k | n!$ . Since each root is an integer, the geometric mean will also be an integer.

b) If we define $q$ as an arbitrarily large number, and $x$ and $y$ as numbers in set $S$ , we know that ${\sqrt[q]{\frac{x}{y}}}$ is irrational for large enough $q$ , meaning that it cannot be expressed as the fraction of two integers. However, both the geometric mean of the set of $x$ and $q-1$ other arbitrary numbers in $S$ and the set of $y$ and the same other $q-1$ numbers are integers, so since the other numbers cancel out, the geometric means divided, or ${\sqrt[q]{\frac{x}{y}}}$ , must be rational. This is a contradiction, so no such infinite $S$ is possible.

-aops111 (first solution dont bully me)

1984 USAMO (Problems • Resources)
Preceded by Problem 1	Followed by Problem 3
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5
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1984 USAMO Problems/Problem 2

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