How to solve this system with equation and inequality?
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migongoniwt
Answered question
2022-06-21
How to solve this system with equation and inequality?
Answer & Explanation
Elianna Douglas
Beginner2022-06-22Added 23 answers
Well, as suspected, your edit brings a new piece of information (the inequation) that allows to easily solve that system using only high-school mathematics (the role of the inequality being to rule out the "ugly" non-zero solutions) - with the exception of a single step in the proof that seems to require very high-level mathematics. For simplicity, let . The equation implies that . Plugging this into the inequality and performing all the necessary simplifications brings it to
Inside the second pair of brackets one recognizes , so there are only two possibilities: - either and - or and Since , the first possibility implies that so that , which also satisfies . Returning to , this has the consequence that and , or equally well and . Since , it follows that x cannot take that negative value. Can it take the positive one? Assuming it could, this would mean that , which after exponentiation would be equivalent to . This, in turn, implies that , which after raising to the th power implies that . This is not true, but I do not know how to prove this at a high-school level. Maybe you are supposed to use a scientific calculator to solve your problem? Anyway, that is irrational is a consequence of the Gelfond-Schneider theorem, or of the Lindemann-Weierstrass theorem, both of them, though, being vastly out of the reach of high-school pupils. In any case, the conclusion so far is that does not lead to solutions of the given system. The second possibility reduces to , because the square is always , but since , this would imply that ( being the only number both and ), which has the only solution . The analysis could have been performed equally well by replacing with and performing all the compuations with , instead of with , but the reasoning would have reached the same difficult point about that has been reached above.