True or false:
Consider a quadratic expression , where and are rational numbers. If for all rational numbers , is the square of a rational number, then must be the square of a linear polynomial.
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By completing the square, we simply need to consider polynomials of the form x 2 + m n , where m , n are coprime integers.
With x = 0 , we get that m n is a square of a rational number, and hence n m is a perfect square.
With x = m 1 , we get that m 2 n m + 1 is a square of a rational number, and hence n m + 1 is a perfect square.
Since the only 2 perfect squares that differ by one are 0 and 1, hence we conclude that n m = 0 . Since m = 0 , thus n = 0 , and hence we conclude that f ( x ) = x 2 which is a square of a polynomial.