Problem:
Find all pairs of integers so that each of the two cubic polynomials
has all the roots to be integers.
Solutions — 2
Solution 1
Solution:
The only such pair is , which clearly works. To prove this is the only one, let us prove an auxiliary result first.
Lemma If are reals so that and , then
Proof. Some two of these reals have the same sign; WLOG, suppose . Then , so by substituting this,
So we simply need to show . Since and , we have
Adding these and using triangle inequality,
Here we have used the fact that and are both nonnegative. This proves our claim.
For our main problem, suppose the roots of are the integers and the roots of are the integers . By Vieta's relations, we have
If all six of these roots had an absolute value of at least 2, by our lemma, we would have
which is absurd. Thus at least one of them is in the set ; WLOG, suppose it's .
1. If , then , so . Then the roots of are precisely the cube roots of , and these are all real only for . Thus , which is a solution.
2. If , then , so and can't both be even. If is odd, then are all odd, so cannot be zero. Similarly, if is odd, we get a contradiction.
The proof is now complete.
Solution 2
Solution:
The only such pair is , which clearly works. Let us prove this is the only one. In what follows, we use to denote the largest integer so that for any non-zero .
If one of the cubics has 0 as a root, say the first one, then , so . Then the roots of are precisely the cube roots of , and these are all real only for . Thus .
So suppose none of the roots are zero. Take the cubic , and suppose its roots are . We cannot have ; indeed, if we had for odd , then
But is odd, and hence non-zero, so this cannot happen.
Thus we can assume WLOG that . Then the third root is . Similarly, the three roots of can be written as where . By Vieta's relations,
Suppose and for odd and ; in particular . Then
Here is clearly odd, so .
Also,
Again, all the terms in the second factor are even except , so the entire factor is odd. This means .
Therefore
Similarly, one may show
But then
Here we have used the fact that for any integer . But this is a contradiction, proving our claim.