$\sum_{k=0}^{100} a_k x^{k}=0, a_i \in \mathbb{Z}$ How many equations?

Solution 1:

Denote the number of quadratic equations with $x_j\in(0,m)$ by $N(m)$. If you think about the standard solution to a quadratic $x^2+cx+d=0$ where $c$ and $d$ are integers, the midpoint between the two roots will be at $-c/2$, so we'll only want to consider cases where $$-m/2\lt c\lt0$$ (otherwise the roots will be too far apart; the strict bounds follow because we're working on an open interval). From the conditions that $$0\lt \frac{-c-\sqrt{c^2-4d}}{2},\frac{-c+\sqrt{c^2-4d}}{2}\lt m$$ we can solve for $d$ to give the bounds $-(m^2+mc)\lt d\lt0$. Notice that this already contains the condition that the roots are real (though not necessarily distinct). Now in order to count the number of solutions, let $\#d(c,m)$ denote the number of permissible values of $d$ for a given value of $c$ (and $m$, of course). Now we can take $$d=-1,...,-(m^2+mc)+1,$$, which is $(m^2+mc)-1$ choices, so $\#d(c,m)=(m^2+mc)-1$. Hence $$N(m)=\sum_{-\lfloor \frac{m}{2}\rfloor\leq c\leq -1}{\#d(c,m)}$$ (i.e. we're summing over the different possibilities for $c$), and since for an arithmetic series $$a+(a+1)+...+(a+n)=\frac{n(2a+n+1)}{2},$$ we can write $$N(m) = \sum_{-\lfloor \frac{m}{2}\rfloor\leq c\leq -1}{(m^2+mc-1)}=\lfloor \frac{m}{2}\rfloor(m^2-1)+m \sum_{c=-(m-1)}^{-1}{c},$$ or $$N(m)=(m^2-1)\lfloor \frac{m}{2}\rfloor-m\sum_{c=1}^{\lfloor \frac{m}{2}\rfloor}{c}=(m^2-1)\lfloor \frac{m}{2}\rfloor-\frac{m}{2}\lfloor \frac{m}{2}\rfloor(\lfloor \frac{m}{2}\rfloor+1).$$ Now given this explicit form of $N(m)$, we can choose equations to make up the original (with replacement, because you allowed repetition). There are $N(m)^{50}$ ways of doing this, and we're done (the order of the roots doesn't really matter; there exists some order of course, but we don't need to make it explicit for the counting argument). This expression is not terribly elegant of course, you could clean it up slightly by treating odd and even $m$ separately etc.

Edit: I've been a bit hasty in jumping to conclusions with this, apologies. This could be seen as a lower bound, given that the true number would have to be an expression involving the number of irreducible polynomials of every degree $\leq 100$ for every possible partition of $100$, but maybe even that's wrong - it's be necessary to prove that the number of equations is finite (which I've obviously assumed, but perhaps that requires proof). I'm not entirely sure where to take this, but it might be useful to consider the Samuelson-Laguerre inequality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuelson%27s_inequality because it allows you to bound the roots.