Let and be positive integers. Prove that there exists a positive integer such that for every odd integer , the digits in the base- representation of are all greater than .
Solution
Let and be given positive integers.
Let be an odd integer, and consider the base- representation of .
Recall that in base-, the digits of a number are the coefficients in the expansion:
where .
We want all digits in the base- representation of to be greater than .
Let us show that for sufficiently large odd , this is possible.
First, note that for large (since is fixed and grows), so the base- representation of will have at most two digits.
Let us write in base :
Let , where .
So the digits are and .
We want both and .
Let us estimate and for large .
We have:
So , .
For large , is much larger than , so is large.
Let us check that for large :
For large , grows without bound, so for all sufficiently large .
Now, .
But is the remainder when is divided by .
We want .
Let us show that for large , can be made arbitrarily large.
Note that modulo can be written as follows:
Let be odd. Then modulo is congruent to .
But modulo can take values between and .
For large , grows rapidly, so the remainder cycles through all possible values as increases.
But for odd and large, modulo is also odd (since is odd, is odd), so is odd.
Thus, for large odd , can be made arbitrarily large, and in particular, for all sufficiently large .
Therefore, for all sufficiently large odd , both digits and in the base- representation of are greater than .
Thus, there exists a positive integer such that for every odd integer , the digits in the base- representation of are all greater than .