Suppose are integers whose greatest common divisor is . Let be a set of integers with the following properties.
a. For , .
b. For (not necessarily distinct), .
c. For any integers , if , then .
Prove that must be equal to the set of all integers.
Suppose are integers whose greatest common divisor is . Let be a set of integers with the following properties.
a. For , .
b. For (not necessarily distinct), .
c. For any integers , if , then .
Prove that must be equal to the set of all integers.
We may as well assume that none of the is equal to . We start with the following observations.
d. by (b).
e. whenever , by (a) and (d).
f. If and , then by (c) and (e).
By (f) plus strong induction on , we have that for any whenever . By (d) and (e), the same holds even if , and so we have the following.
g. For , contains all multiples of .
We next verify that
h. For and any integers , .
We do this by induction on . If and , this follows from (b), (d), (f), so we may assume that . Suppose without loss of generality (by switching with and/or negating both and ) that ; then
and we have , by the induction hypothesis, and again by the induction hypothesis. So by (f), and (h) is verified.
Let be the largest integer such that divides ; without loss of generality we may assume that . Let be the greatest common divisor of . We prove by induction on that contains all multiples of for ; the case is the desired result. Our base cases are and , which follow from (g) and (h), respectively.
Assume that contains all multiples of , for some . Let be the set of integers such that is divisible by and for all integers . Then contains nonzero positive and negative numbers, namely any multiple of by (h). By (c), if and divisible by (so in ) satisfy , then . By taking , we deduce that ; by induction (as in the proof of (g)), we have for any integer (positive, negative or zero).
From the way we ordered the , we see that the highest power of dividing is greater than or equal to the highest power of dividing . In other words, is odd. We can thus find integers with even such that . (Choose such a pair without any restriction on , and replace with if needed to get an even .) Then for any integer , we have and so . This completes the induction and the proof of the desired result.
(By Tony Zhang) We present a different way of completing the proof after the observing (d) through (h) of the preceding solution. We proceed to prove the following lemma by induction:
Lemma Let . For and :
Proof: Observation (h) proves the case, so now assume that the Lemma is true for all less than or equal to some . Now by induction hypothesis, the following terms are in :
Yet their difference is
which is in by induction hypothesis, so by observation (f), their sum is in :
which completes the induction, and the proof of the Lemma.
We apply the Lemma to prove that ; by the comment following observation (f) in the previous solution, this will prove that . Apply the lemma with , , , ..., . Since we are given that the greatest common divisor of the is , there exist integers such that . Since we can't have all even, without loss of generality, assume that is odd. Now let iterate from to , and at each stage perform the following operations if is odd:
a. replace with ,
b. replace with .
Note that this preserves the sum , but it makes all the between and even; therefore, the lemma applies, and we find that , as desired.