TITLE: Do there exist several positive real numbers such that their sum is $1$ and sum of their squares is less than $0.01$
QUESTION [6 upvotes]: Do there exist several positive real numbers such that their sum is $1$ and sum of their squares is less than $0.01$?
My Attempt: Let there are $n$ real numbers and we call them $x_{1},x_{2},..,x_{n}$. Since they are positive real so WLOG we can assume $x_{1}\geq x_{2}..\geq x_{n}$. The condition $x_{1}+x_{2}+..+x_{n}=n \implies x_{n} \leq \frac{1}{n}$. Also $x_{1}\geq x_{2}..\geq x_{n} \implies x_{1}^{2}\geq x_{2}^{2}..\geq x_{n}^{2}$
After this point I am stuck.

REPLY [2 votes]: The intuition:
When you square a number $x$, you multiply $x$ by $x$. That means that $x^2$ is always "$x$ times bigger" than $x$.
Suppose $x$ is large, like $100$. $100^2$ is much bigger than $100$. To be precise, it's $100$ times bigger. Examples like this give us the intuition "squaring makes a number bigger... and the larger the number, the larger the effect of squaring".
But if $x$ is smaller than $1$, "$x$ times bigger" is a confusing thing to say – multiplying a number by $x$ actually makes it smaller. So $x^2$ will be smaller than $x$ when $x$ is less than one.
For instance, suppose $x$ is $0.01$. $0.01^2$ is much smaller than $0.01$. To be precise, it's $1/0.01=100$ times smaller. By taking $x$ closer and closer to zero, you can make $x^2$ smaller than $x$ is, by bigger and bigger factors.
The problem at hand:
"Do there exist several positive real numbers such that their sum is 1 and sum of their squares is less than $0.01$?"
This problem asks us to find numbers that sum to $1$, even though their squares sum to less than $0.01$. That is, it is asking us to find numbers whose squares are really small, even though the numbers themselves aren't that small.
The intuition above tells us how to find these numbers: just take numbers much smaller than $1$!. We'll need a lot of them, to make them add up to $1$, but their squares will shrink by so much that this won't be a problem.
To start with, take ten copies of $0.1$. They add up to $1$. Each squared is $0.01$, so the ten squares added up is $0.1$. If the problem said "sum of their squares is less than $0.1$", we'd be done. But it wants us to be below $0.01$. So let's keep going – the smaller the numbers we pick, the more the squares will be less than the numbers.
Take one hundred copies of $0.01$. They add up to $1$. Each squared is $0.0001$, so the one hundred squares added up is $0.0001 \times 100 = 0.01$. Woah – right on the edge. Strictly speaking, the question wants us the sum of the squares to be less than $0.01$, so we need to go one more step.
Take one thousand copies of $0.001$. They add up to $1$. Each squared is $0.00001$, so the one thousand squares added up is $0.00001 \times 1,000 = 0.001$. We're done!
(Looking at the trend of the sum of squares, it's clear that if we kept going, we could get it as small as we wanted. That's what Spenser was saying, when they mentioned convergence. But it's really just a way of describing a trend.)