Cauchy Schwarz inequality proof using discriminant I know the proof but I'm unclear on one thing.
Cauchy-Schwarz inequality: Given X,Y are random variables, the following holds:
$$
(E[XY])^2 \le E[X^2]E[Y^2]
$$
Proof
Let
$$
u(t) = E[(tX - Y)^2]
$$
Then:
$$
t^2E[X^2] - 2tE[XY] + E[Y^2] \ge 0
$$
This is a quadratic in $t$. Thus the discriminant must be non-positive. Therefore:
$$
(E[XY])^2 - E[X^2]E[Y^2] \le 0
$$
Why must the discriminant be non-positive?
 A: Let $p(t):=at^2+bt+c$ be a second degree polynomial. Then the roots of $p(t)$ are: $t_{1,2}:=\frac{-b\pm \sqrt{D}}{2a}$ where $D:=b^2-4ac$. This defines the discriminant $D$ of a polynomial. if $D\geq 0$, this implies that both roots (possibly repeated) are real. In particular if $D>0$, there are two distinct real roots, and you can easily prove that this implies $p(x)<0$ for at least one $x$ (consider the derivative at either of the roots). 
$D\leq 0$ this implies both roots are imaginary, so that either $p(t)\leq 0$ or $p(t)\geq 0$ for all $t$. Similarly if $p(t)\geq 0$ or $p(t)\leq 0$ for all $t$, this implies $p(t)$ can have at most one distinct real root. 
If you now define $p(t):=t^2E[X^2]-2tE[XY]+E[Y^2]$, you've proven thus far that $p(t)\geq 0$, since $u(t)\geq 0$. It follows that the discriminant $D$ of $p$ must be non-positive, e.g. $D(t)\leq 0$. 
A: The quadratic in question must have complex roots, or at best two identical real roots; else there would be an interval $I$ such that for all $t\in I$, the random variable $tX-Y$ has negative mean-square value $E[(tX-Y)^2]$ which is impossible.
If the discriminant is negative, then the roots of the quadratic are complex-valued (remember $\frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$ where $b^2-4ac$ is the discriminant?) and so everything works as expected.  
What if the quadratic has two identical real-valued roots and so has value $0$ for one specific $t$?  Well, in that case, $tX-Y$ has mean-square value $0$, that is, $tX$ is a perfect predictor of $Y$ and it must be that the correlation coefficient $\rho_{X,Y}$ has value $\pm 1$.
A: I explained this to myself by visualising the graphs of a repeated root quadratic equation.
For any $x \in R$, $(ax + b)^2 \ge 0$ and graph of $y = (ax + b)^2$ must be a parabola above the x-line or touching the x line. This means that the equation $y = (ax + b)^2$ either has no roots (graph not touching/intersecting x-line at all) or has at most a repeated root (graph touching x-line). Therefore, the discriminant of $y = (ax + b)^2$ must satisfy $D \le 0$.
Going back to the stats question, $(tX + Y)^2$ must be a positive number for any $t \in R$. Therefore, $y = (tX + y)^2$ must be a parabola above the x-line or at most touching the x line. Similarly to above, this means $D \le 0$.
