For integral , let be the greatest prime divisor of . By convention, we set and . Find all polynomials with integer coefficients such that the sequence is bounded above. (In particular, this requires for .)
Solution
The polynomial has the required properties if and only if
where are odd positive integers and is a nonzero integer. It is straightforward to verify that polynomials given by have the required property. If is a prime divisor of but not of , then or for some . Hence . The prime divisors of form a finite set and do affect whether or not the given sequence is bounded above. The rest of the proof is devoted to showing that any for which is bounded above is given by .
Let denote the set of all polynomials with integral coefficients. Given , let denote the set of those primes that divide at least one of the numbers in the sequence . The solution is based on the following lemma.
Lemma If is a nonconstant polynomial then is infinite.
Proof: Repeated use will be made of the following basic fact: if and are distinct integers and , then divides . If , then divides for every prime , so is infinite. If , then every prime divisor of satisfies . Otherwise divides , which in turn divides . This yields , which is false. Hence implies that is infinite. To complete the proof, set and observe that and . The preceding argument shows that is infinite, and it follows that is infinite.
Suppose is nonconstant and there exists a number such that for all . Application of the lemma to shows that there is an infinite sequence of distinct primes and a corresponding infinite sequence of nonnegative integers such that for all . Consider the sequence where . Then and . Hence , so for all . It follows that there is an integer such that and for infinitely many . Let . Then and . Consequently, for infinitely many , which shows that is a zero of . Since for , must be odd. Then where . (See the note below.) Observe that must be bounded above. If is constant, we are done. If is nonconstant, the argument can be repeated to show that is given by .