Loading [MathJax]/jax/output/HTML-CSS/jax.js

Monday, January 12, 2015

Unit fraction chord lengths

Another interesting property of unit fractions (numbers of the form 1n for positive integer n).

Part A)

Suppose f:[0,1]R is any continuous function such that f(0)=f(1).

Show that for every natural number n>0, there is some c[0,1] (c dependent on n and f) such that f(c)=f(c+1n)

Basically the graph of f has a chord of length 1n.

Part B)

Suppose r(0,1) is a real number such that r is not a unit fraction.

Show that there is some continuous function fr (dependent on r) such that

fr:[0,1]R, fr(0)=fr(1) and for any c[0,1r], fr(c)fr(c+r).

i.e the graph of fr has no chord of length r.

[Solution]



No comments:

Post a Comment