Stanley110 wrote:
>
> Ladies and Gentlemen,
>
> What is the physical significance or meaning regarding a manufacturing process
> whose output over an extended period of time has the same value for the
> arithmetic, geometric and harmonic mean of a property, its purity, for
> example? ... > Or if any two are same and the third is different?
If any two are the same, the significance is that the output is
CONSTANT. For instance, for the arithmetic and geometric means:
(A) if n=2, AM = GM => x_1 = x_2.
Proof: sqrt(x_1 x_2) = (x_1 + x_2)/2
<=> x_1 x_2 = x_1^2/4 + x_1 x_2/2 + x_2^2/4
<=>0= x_1^2/4 - x_1 x_2/2 + x_2^2/4
= (x_1 - x_2)^2
<=> x_1 = x_2
(B) if n is a power of 2, by induction all the x_i are equal.
(C) even if n isn't a power of 2 a bit of algebra shows that
the same result holds (forgive me for omitting the details
but it's late in the day and I have to get home to my family.)
Similar results hold for the other pairs of means, left as an
exercise (quite a pleasant one) for the curious.
If any of the data differ, there are inequalities (proved as above)
that show that the AM > GM > HM in all cases.
Analogous results hold for distributions.
-Robert Dawson
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