2015 AIME II Problems/Problem 6
Contents
Problem
Steve says to Jon, "I am thinking of a polynomial whose roots are all positive integers. The polynomial has the form for some positive integers
and
. Can you tell me the values of
and
?"
After some calculations, Jon says, "There is more than one such polynomial."
Steve says, "You're right. Here is the value of ." He writes down a positive integer and asks, "Can you tell me the value of
?"
Jon says, "There are still two possible values of ."
Find the sum of the two possible values of .
Solution 1 (Algebra)
We call the three roots (some may be equal to one another) ,
, and
. Using Vieta's formulas, we get
,
, and
.
Squaring our first equation we get .
We can then subtract twice our second equation to get .
Simplifying the right side:
So, we know .
We can then list out all the triples of positive integers whose squares sum to :
We get ,
, and
.
These triples give values of
,
, and
, respectively, and
values of
,
, and
, respectively.
We know that Jon still found two possible values of when Steve told him the
value, so the
value must be
. Thus, the two
values are
and
, which sum to
.
~BealsConjecture~
Solution 2 (Algebra+ Brute Force)
First things first. Vietas gives us the following:
From ,
must have odd parity, meaning
must be a multiple of
, which implies that both sides of
are even. Then, from
, we see that an odd number of
,
, and
must be odd, because we have already deduced that
is odd. In order for both sides of
to be even, there must only be one odd number and two even numbers.
Now, the theoretical maximum value of the left side of is
. That means that the maximum bound of
is where
which simplifies to
meaning
So now we have that
from
,
from
, and
is odd from
. This means that
could equal
,
, or
. At this point, we have simplified the problem to the point where we can casework+ brute force. As said above, we arrive at our solutions of
,
, and
, of which the last two return equal
values. Then,
AWD.
Solution 3 (Calculus, not as good)
Since each of the roots is positive, the local maximum of the function must occur at a positive value of . Taking
of the polynomial yields
, which is equal to
at the local maximum. Since this is a quadratic in
, we can find an expression for
in terms of
. The quadratic formula gives
, which simplifies to
. We know that
is a positive integer, and testing small positive integer values of
yields
or
when
, and
or
when
. Because the value of
alone does not determine the polynomial,
,
must equal
.
Now our polynomial equals . Because one root is less than (or equal to) the
value at the local maximum (picture the graph of a cubic equation), it suffices to synthetically divide by small integer values of
to see if the resulting quadratic also has positive integer roots. Dividing by
leaves a quotient of
, and dividing by
leaves a quotient of
. Thus,
, or
. Our answer is
~bad_at_mathcounts
See also
2015 AIME II (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | ||
Preceded by Problem 5 |
Followed by Problem 7 | |
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 | ||
All AIME Problems and Solutions |
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