Given that and are natural numbers, when is divided by , the quotient is and the remainder is , where . Find all possible pairs of numbers and such that .
Solution
We are given that
Since , we have
which implies , and hence . Thus, we have
Since , we must have , and so .
It remains to solve the equation
This can be rewritten as
Let and . WLOG assume . Then we have . So it suffices to check . Also, and must be odd since . We compute the values as follows.
| x | 529 | 625 | 729 | 841 | 961 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| y | 513 | 417 | 313 | 201 | 81 |
Among these values, only is a perfect square. Therefore, we can only have . Since , this implies . However, we need . Therefore, only is possible. We check that when , we have
Therefore, this is the only solution up to permutation.
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