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North Macedonia

North Macedonia algebra

Problem

Find all functions , for which: for every real numbers , and and .
Solution
For , we get and because of , we get that . For we get , from where , for every real number . For , we get , so , for every real numbers and .

Let , for some real number , then for we get that , and this implies that for every real number either or . Let an arbitrary real number and let be a real number such that and (such a number exists, because if , then for , ). For and we get . If , then we get , which is a contradiction, so from here and . If , for and we get which is not possible (). This implies that for every real number it holds . If for some real numbers and , it holds . For and , we get . For и we get . For and , we get . For and , we get . For and we get . For and we get and for and , we get . This implies that for every real numbers and for which , the following relationships hold and if , the following relationships hold (if one is , than from the first case it follows that all are ). From here we have , for every real numbers and , so If , then for an arbitrary real number and , we get , so either and or and . If for some real numbers and , the equalities and hold for and we get If , for and we get and we get , i.e if and have the same sign, then , and if they have the opposite sign, then . Let for hold and for , hold , then and if and only if and belong to the same set, and if and only if and belong to different sets (if real numbers and such that don't exist, then the set is empty and , for all real numbers). Let be an arbitrary subset of and . We define a function , for which if and only if and belong to the same set, and if and only if and belong to different sets. For the function , holds (the function does not depend on the sign before and before ). If and are in the same set, then and (or is in the same set with and , or in the other), so the product . If and belong to different sets, then , and is either in the same set with or with , so , i.e. . This implies that, the functions defined in this way satisfy the given functional equation and from the discussion above, they are unique.
Final answer
All solutions are of the form f(x, y) = s(|x|) s(|y|), where s maps nonnegative real numbers (including zero) to either plus one or minus one. Equivalently, choose any subset M of the nonnegative reals and let f(x, y) = 1 if the absolute values of x and y both lie in M or both lie outside M, and f(x, y) = −1 otherwise. These functions take only the values ±1 and satisfy f(0,0) = 1.

Techniques

Existential quantifiers