Given a positive integer and an integer , show that is divisible by for some positive integer .
Solution
Proceed by induction on . Since , works for , so let and let be a positive integer such that is divisible by .
If is even, then is clearly divisible by .
If is odd, we will show that is divisible by .
To this end, write . The first term is an odd multiple of , and it is sufficient to prove that so is the second.
Induct on to show that is an odd multiple of . Since , this is clearly the case if , and the induction step follows from the identity . This completes the proof.
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