An Engaging Algebraic Identity
A question has been asked on a linkedin group to prove the following engaging identity
Prove
provided
.
One of the posts pointed to a solution at Stevens Society of Mathematicians. What follows is a slight simplification of that proof.
Denote the left factor
and the right factor
. Observe that whenever two of the arguments in
are equal, the whole expression vanishes. For example,

Adding the fractions in
,
. What we just showed implies that the numerator
is divisible by
. Multiplying through confirms that
.
Now, let's turn to the right factor. Up to now we have not used the condition
. It's time we do. Introduce
Seen as a system of linear equations with
as unknown, it's degenerate because
. The situation improves if we replace any of the equations with
. Then, for example,
Similarly,
and
. This allows us to express the right factor
in terms of
:
This is exactly the same form as
, implying that
.
Finally, 