Determine all pairs of positive integers such that for the equation
holds.
Solution
Answer. There are three such pairs, , and .
For , we get and the given equation becomes the contradiction . This works analogously for .
Therefore, we can assume and .
We start with the case which gives the equation
The possible factorizations and give the pairs and , respectively, because is satisfied.
Now, we treat the case . The given equation is equivalent to
Because of and , we get
Together with , we obtain , which gives indeed the third pair with .
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