HMMT February 2020 #0kdn

HMMT February 2020Hard

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Understand the scale

Scale 0.5: Easiest math competition problems, often solvable even for early middle school students without experience. 1: Problems strictly for beginners, often at a moderate middle school level. 1.5: Problems for stronger beginner students, on the level of the middling problems in most middle school contests. 2: For motivated beginners, harder questions from the previous categories. 2.5: More advanced beginner problems, hardest questions from previous categories. 3: Early intermediate problems that require more creative thinking. 3.5: Tougher early intermediate problems that consistently stretch into higher-level creative thinking or conceptual knowledge. 4: Intermediate-level problems. 4.5: Upper intermediate problems approaching the upper bound for non-invitational sprint math competitions. 5: More difficult AIME problems or simple proof-based Olympiad-style problems. 6: High-level AIME-styled questions or introductory Olympiad-level questions. 7: Tougher Olympiad-level questions, may require more technical knowledge. 8: High-level Olympiad-level questions. 9: Expert Olympiad-level questions. 9.5: The hardest problems appearing on Olympiads which the strongest students could reasonably solve. 10: Historically notorious problems, generally unsuitable for even very hard competitions because they are exceedingly tedious, long, and difficult.

Cauchy-SchwarzSums and productsPolynomial operations

Problem

Problem: Find the smallest real constant $\alpha$ such that for all positive integers $n$ and real numbers $0 = y_{0} < y_{1} < \cdots < y_{n}$ , the following inequality holds:

\alpha \sum_{k=1}^{n} \frac{(k+1)^{3 / 2}}{\sqrt{y_{k}^{2}-y_{k-1}^{2}}} \geq \sum_{k=1}^{n} \frac{k^{2}+3 k+3}{y_{k}} \text{.}

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