Find all positive real numbers such that there are infinitely many pairs of positive integers satisfying the following conditions: and among numbers there is no square of an integer.
Solution
We prove that satisfies the condition in the statement if and only if .
Let us first consider any . For any positive integer , define
Observe that
and
Therefore, every such pair indeed satisfies the property from the problem statement, and there are infinitely many such pairs.
Now let us consider any , and let be any pair of positive integers satisfying the property from the problem statement. Observe that for each positive integer , the number is always between numbers and (inclusive), hence there is always a square of an integer in the range
This implies that , so in particular
Combining this with the inequality from the problem statement yields
Observe that since , we have for large enough . Indeed, equivalently we have , and the left-hand side tends to 1 as grows to infinity while the right hand side is strictly smaller than 1. This implies that (1) may be satisfied only for finitely many positive integers . Since for all pairs satisfying the conditions from the problem statement, this implies that there are only finitely many such pairs .