CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

The theory of means has its roots in the work of the Pythagoreans who introduced the

harmonic mean, geometric mean, and arithmetic mean with reference to their theories of music

and arithmetic. Later, Pappus introduced seven other means and gave the well-known elegant

geometric proof of the celebrated inequalities among the harmonic, geometric, and arithmetic

means. The theory of means has grown to occupy a prominent place in mathematics with

hundreds of papers on the subject appearing every year [7]. Stolarsky [4] was first to initiate his

independent investigation about some of the extended means such as the logarithmic mean. In

[4] he discusses them briefly and then proceeds to multivariable generalization. The mean value

theorem has a significant application to create an infinite number of new means simply by

varying the function f. He obtained a new elementary inequality involving the geometric,

logarithmic, identric, and arithmetic means. In [5] he proved the inequalities for power and

generalized logarithmic means.

This paper discusses the proof for one of the inequalities of power mean and identric

mean. The proof uses the properties of inequalities and some theorems that are related to the

power and identric means.

Significance of the Study

This paper provides more information and concepts about the power and identric means

as well as their inequalities. The theory of means has strong relations and interactions with the

theory of inequalities, functional equations, and probability and statistics. This would be useful

to geometers, algebraists, and other researchers as a reference to their studies.

Methodology

This paper presents the proof of the power mean-identric mean inequality, proposed by

Sidney H. Kung. Definitions and discussions are also presented for clearer understanding of the

study. This also includes the consideration of the symmetry and homogeneity of power mean and

identric mean. The Mean Value Theorem also has a significance in the proof of the inequality.

The symbol ■ in this paper denotes end of proof.