Problem:
How many are the ordered pairs of positive integers less than or equal to such that and are powers of ?
Problem:
How many are the ordered pairs of positive integers less than or equal to such that and are powers of ?
Solution:
The answer is . Suppose . Then we get even, hence odd. But with odd is a power of two if and only if .
Now we just need to count all the pairs that satisfy the hypotheses with . This means that there exist two positive integers and such that and . Since , we have .
From the second equation we deduce that both numbers are odd, so there exists an odd such that and . Substituting into the second equation we obtain . Since we have which implies .
At this point if we get that the pairs of the form , together with their symmetric counterparts, satisfy the requirements. They number , because the exponents between and work.
Alternatively we have . The factors and are coprime, so one of the two is divisible by . In both cases we have that . But then and thus which implies . But we had already observed that , hence , that is and so the pairs are of the type , together with their symmetric counterparts. They are , since the exponents between and work, but we must count only once, hence the .
However we must be careful that we have counted some solutions both in this family and in the previous one, namely and . The total number of pairs satisfying the requirements is therefore .