Good warm up problem
In case you are just waking up or you just got on brilliant, here is a great problem to warm up your mind with. Also, I'm starting a new set of problems called "the warm ups problem sets." Made of Relatively easy or medium difficulty problems. I will be posting probably 1 or more per day.
The minimum value of can be written as a/b for co-prime integers a,b. Find a+b.
The answer is 5947.
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1 solution
We take the derivative of this function, and are left with 2 x 3 + 2 x 2 − 8 x − 8 = 0 . We factor this to (x+1)(x+2)(2x-4)=0. Then we plug in the answers to see what yields the minimum value. And we find that it occurs at x=2.
Is there any way to skip the plug and chug step?