Maths Olympiad Prep

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Number theory Difficulty 5.7 AIME, harder Prove it Ukraine

Show that one can choose 8 pairwise distinct numbers among 1,2,,100001, 2, \ldots, 10000, such that none of them is a perfect square and that no sum of the several of them is a perfect square.

Solution

Consider the following 7 numbers: 21,23,,213=8192<100002^1, 2^3, \ldots, 2^{13} = 8192 < 10000. Clearly, the sum of any subset of them is such that the highest power of 22 that divides the sum is odd, thus, it is not a perfect square.

Add number 33 to the chosen numbers. Suppose it is possible to choose several numbers such that their sum is a perfect square. Then 33 is one of such numbers, otherwise we get a contradiction as shown above. Since a perfect square can only have a remainder 00, 11 or 44 when divided by 88, and since the sum is odd, then the only possible remainder is 11. However, only numbers 22 and 33 have a non-zero remainder when divided by 88, thus, it is not possible to obtain a sum with remainder 11 when divided by 88.

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