Find all pairs of prime numbers such that .
Saudi Arabian Mathematical Competitions, 2012
Solution
The only such pair is .
We have . Since is prime and and , there exists an integer such that
Since we deduce that . We have from (1) and (2) that
and so we obtain that is divisible by .
Since this means that
Applying the substitution from (3) to (1) and (2), we obtain
which after cancellations gives and therefore . Replacing in (3) and then in (2) we obtain , the only solution.
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