Let be a natural number. Determine the smallest natural number such that among any natural numbers, it is always possible to select an even number of them having a sum divisible by .
Solution
We start with a lemma.
Lemma 1. Let be even integers. Then there is a subsequence of such that is divisible by .
Proof. Consider the following integers
If there is some such that , we are done. So we assume that divides none of the 's and since there are numbers there exist such that . This implies
and the proof is complete.
Now for the main problem, we have two cases.
* is an odd number. The answer is . Firstly, note that for if we set , we cannot choose an even number of 's with sum divisible by . On the other hand, if are integers, then we define for . By arguments same as the proof of the lemma, there is some such that or there exists such that . In both cases we have found an even number of 's having sum divisible by .
* is an even number. We claim that is the answer. Note that for , if we set and , it is not possible to select an even number of 's having a sum divisible by . On the other hand, suppose that are arbitrary integers. Assume that are the even numbers among 's and are the odd numbers. Since , exactly one of or is odd and the other is even. We suppose that is odd and is even (the other case is similar). Now look at the numbers . Note that all these sums are even, so referring to the lemma, we can select some of them with sum divisible by . Since each of these numbers is sum of two members of 's we have found an even number of 's having a sum divisible by , as desired.