Problem:
Determine all pairs of integers that solve the equation .
Problem:
Determine all pairs of integers that solve the equation .
Solution:
The equation is symmetric in and , so we can restrict ourselves to considering solutions with . There are no solutions with and both positive: indeed in that case we would have , a contradiction.
If at least one of and is equal to zero, say , then substituting into the equation we find , that is , giving the two solutions and .
If then and are both strictly less than , then (still assuming ) we find . If we had , then we would also have and therefore could not be positive. It would follow that , and hence cannot be a solution if . We must therefore check the cases and , which (recalling that we are assuming ) lead to the unique solution .
It remains for us to determine the solutions with and : let us set , so that is a positive integer. The equation can be rewritten in the two equivalent forms
from the second expression we deduce that , while from the first we find . Since we then have
from which , that is . Since we have already observed that is positive, it must be that , and substituting we find
an equation that is satisfied for any value of . Recalling that at the beginning we had assumed we then see that the solutions of the proposed equation are the pair and the infinitely many pairs for every integer value of : those with are those for which , and those with are the symmetric ones with .
Second Solution: We observe that
so the pairs of the form are solutions for every integer .
Multiplying the second factor by , moreover, we can write
which, being a sum of squares, vanishes only when , that is when .