It can be shown that any triangle with area and perimeter must satisfy Does there exist any positive integer and constant such that
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
This problem came about because someone mentioned they thought an inequality of the form P 3 ≥ k A was true. What's wrong with this at a quick glance? The units don't work out! It doesn't make sense that you could relate units 3 and units 2 in this way; that's the intuitive reason why n = 2 gives the only valid inequality here.
For a more algebraic approach, note that P 2 = 1 2 3 ⋅ A holds true for an equilateral triangle, so we can have A P n = ( 1 2 3 ) n / 2 ⋅ A n / 2 − 1 . Taking A → 0 and A → ∞ shows it is impossible for this ratio to always be ≥ k . (It's probably worth handling the n = 1 case separately, but it also follows from the same logic.)