Let be a subset of with the following property: For any three elements and () of , does not divide . Determine the largest possible size of . Justify your claim.
Solution
The answer is .
When , the sum of any two elements in is at least , which is larger than the largest element in . Therefore, does not divide for any . This gives a possible case for .
Next, consider any subset satisfying the constraint. Suppose the largest element of is . Then contains at most one element in each of the pairs
(note that the last pair may contain the same number, which does not affect the validity of our claim). Therefore, contains at most elements smaller than . Since is the largest element, cannot contain elements larger than . Therefore,
Hence, the largest possible size of is .
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