Find all natural numbers for which there exist primes and such that .
Solution
The equation is equivalent to . Since the difference of the factors in the r.h.s. is greater than , we must have and . As is a prime number, . Let , . Now the initial equation yields , which is equivalent to
As and are relatively prime, . Since is a prime number and , there are only two possibilities: or . In the first case, substituting to (1) gives , implying , (or the other way around). Then by the initial equation. In the second case similarly we get , where the only possibility is and .
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