Let be a function such that for all pairs of positive integers. Prove that there exists a positive integer which divides all values of .
Solutions — 2
Solution 1
For every positive integer , define .
Lemma. If the set is infinite, then for some positive integer .
Proof. Let ; the definition of yields .
Whenever and , we have , so and therefore . Let be the least positive integer with ; repeating the same step, we can see that . By the minimality of , this shows and therefore .
Starting from an arbitrarily large element of , the process above reaches all multiples of ; so they all are elements of .
The solution for the problem will be split into two cases.
Case 1: The function is bounded.
Call a prime frequent if the set is infinite, i.e., if divides for infinitely many positive integers ; otherwise call sporadic. Since the function is bounded, there are only a finite number of primes that divide at least one ; so altogether there are finitely many numbers such that has a sporadic prime divisor. Let be a positive integer, greater than all those numbers .
Let be the frequent primes. By the lemma we have for some . Consider the number
Due to , all prime divisors of are frequent primes. Let be any frequent prime divisor of . Then , and therefore . But , which means . Hence and therefore is a common divisor of all values .
Case 2: is unbounded.
We prove that divides all .
Let . Since , by the lemma it suffices to prove that is an infinite set.
Call a positive integer a peak if . Since is not bounded, there are infinitely many peaks. Let be the sequence of all peaks, and let . Notice that for any peak and for any , we have , hence
By the pigeonhole principle, among the numbers there are infinitely many that are congruent modulo . Let be an infinite sequence of positive integers such that . Notice that
so for all . This provides infinitely many elements in .
Hence, is an infinite set, and therefore divides for every .
Solution 2
Let . From and , we can see that ; then . So the sequence is nonincreasing in the sense that every element is a divisor of the previous elements. Let we have to prove .
For the sake of contradiction, suppose that the statement is wrong, so ; that means there is some index such that for every , i.e., is coprime with .
Claim 1. If then .
Proof. By the condition, ; a trivial induction yields . If then is coprime with , so is a divisor of .
Claim 2. There is a constant such that for every .
Proof. Take the first power of 2 which is greater than or equal to : let . By Claim 1, we have . Notice that implies . If for some and , then we conclude
, so the claim is true with .
Claim 3. If are coprime then . In particular, if are coprime then and are coprime.
Proof. Let . We can replicate Euclid's algorithm. Formally, apply induction on . If or then we already have .
Without loss of generality, suppose . Then and , so . Therefore divides which is a divisor of by the induction hypothesis.
Let be the sequence of all prime numbers; for every , let be the lowest power of with . (Notice that there are only finitely many positive integers with .)
Take a positive integer , and consider the numbers
Here we have numbers, each being greater than 1 , and they are pairwise coprime by Claim 3. Therefore, they have at least different prime divisors in total, and their greatest prime divisor is at least . Hence, .
Choose such that (this is achieved if is sufficiently large), and (that is possible, because there are arbitrarily long gaps between the primes). Then we establish a contradiction
which proves the statement.