Maths Olympiad Prep

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, 2022

Algebra Difficulty 5.2 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

Alice is once again very bored in class. On a whim, she chooses three primes p,q,rp, q, r independently and uniformly at random from the set of primes of at most 3030. She then calculates the roots of px2+qx+rp x^{2} + q x + r. What is the probability that at least one of her roots is an integer?

Solution

Solution:

Since all of the coefficients are positive, any root xx must be negative. Moreover, by the rational root theorem, in order for xx to be an integer we must have either x=1x = -1 or x=rx = -r. So we must have either pr2qr+r=0pr=q1p r^{2} - q r + r = 0 \Longleftrightarrow p r = q - 1 or pq+r=0p - q + r = 0. Neither of these cases are possible if all three primes are odd, so we know that one of the primes is even, hence equal to 22. After this we can do a casework check; the valid triples of (p,q,r)(p, q, r) are (2,5,3),(2,7,5),(2,13,11),(2,19,17),(2,5,2),(2,7,3),(2,11,5),(2,23,11)(2,5,3), (2,7,5), (2,13,11), (2,19,17), (2,5,2), (2,7,3), (2,11,5), (2,23,11), allowing for pp and rr to be swapped. This leads to 1515 valid triples out of 10001000 (there are 1010 primes less than 3030).

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.