Let be the set of positive integers. Let be a function satisfying the following two conditions:
a. and are relatively prime whenever and are relatively prime.
b. for all .
Prove that for any natural number and any prime , if divides then divides .
Let be the set of positive integers. Let be a function satisfying the following two conditions:
a. and are relatively prime whenever and are relatively prime.
b. for all .
Prove that for any natural number and any prime , if divides then divides .
Let be the smallest prime factor of . (Since , must have a prime factor unless and . In this case, we define .) First, we show that for any prime and any , is a power of .
Suppose for the sake of contradiction that is not a power of for some and . Choose sufficiently large so that , and let be the set of primes less than or equal to . For any , we have
and furthermore the numbers are composite for . It follows that , and so can be treated as a function from to . Clearly, is injective because and are relatively prime for any distinct . Then, is bijective and in particular surjective.
Now we can apply the same reasoning we used on primes in to . We have
and so has only prime factors in . Suppose for the sake of contradiction that there is some prime not equal to which divides . Then, by the surjectivity of , there exists such that (and with ). We then find that and are relatively prime, but divides both and , contradicting the first condition in the problem. It follows that is a power of , as claimed.
Next, we show that in fact . Indeed, suppose instead that . Then, choose sufficiently large so that , and letting , choose sufficiently large so that . We find that
By the second condition of the problem, the only possible residues of modulo are the numbers between 1 and 2013, so in particular, cannot be divisible by . On the other hand, , so cannot be any power of , contradicting the fact that since is a power of , must be a power of . This proves our claim that .
Finally, let be any prime, and let be any positive integer relatively prime to . Then, and are relatively prime, and since is a power of , it follows that is not divisible by . This is the contrapositive of the desired result, so we are done.
(By Gabriel Carroll) We first show that for any positive integer and residue , there exists a number such that and .
To see this, let be a set of distinct primes not dividing and larger than 2012. Also, let be another disjoint set of primes, also not dividing and larger than 2012.
By the Chinese Remainder Theorem, there exists a positive integer such that the following congruences hold:
* for ,
* for , and
* .
Note that since and , it follows that is relatively prime to each . Let be the product of the prime factors of not dividing and not equal to for some .
By the Chinese Remainder Theorem again, there exists a positive integer such that the following congruences hold:
* for ,
* for ,
* , and
* .
We first claim that and are relatively prime. Indeed, suppose for the sake of contradiction that a prime divided both and . By the construction of , cannot be a factor of or any of the . Thus, the only remaining possibility is that . However, , so this is impossible.
Thus, since and are relatively prime, we have by the first condition of the problem that and are relatively prime. Next, note that for any , we have
and for any , we have
Recall from the second condition of the problem that and must take the forms and , respectively, where . It follows from the above considerations that we must have , and by construction, we have , as desired.
We can now quickly finish the problem. Suppose for the sake of contradiction that there is a prime and a number such that but . Take to be a positive integer such that and . Then, is relatively prime to , so is relatively prime to . But is divisible by , a contradiction.