Problem:
Does there exist a strictly increasing sequence of positive integers such that for every and every positive integer can be written in a unique way as a difference of two terms of the sequence?
Problem:
Does there exist a strictly increasing sequence of positive integers such that for every and every positive integer can be written in a unique way as a difference of two terms of the sequence?
Solution:
Answer: there is such a sequence. We shall define the required sequence inductively. We set , and assume that are already determined. Denote by the smallest positive integer which cannot be represented as , . Since the number of such differences is , we have .
Set , where is such that
for , . This implies that are all distinct and every integer between and can be written in a unique way as , .
Since there are exactly "forbidden" values for , we can choose with the above properties and such that . Then
and it remains to put the numbers in increasing order (check that the inequality is still valid).