Determine all pairs of a polynomial with integer coefficients and an integer such that the equation , where and are integers and , has infinitely many solutions.
Solution
Note first that divides . So if , there are only finitely many possibilities for . For one of these possible values, let us denote it by , there must be
infinitely many pairs such that and . Note that
is still a polynomial. The only way it can have infinitely many zeros is that it is identically zero. But then for some number .
This gives us the first set of solutions, consisting of an arbitrary integer and a polynomial , where is a (positive or negative) divisor of and an arbitrary integer. This includes the solution where and the polynomial is constant.
For the rest of this solution, we can assume that . If the degree of the polynomial is odd, then there exist integers and such that is either increasing for and for , or decreasing for and . If is increasing for , then , , , ... are a strictly increasing sequence of integers, thus distinct. Moreover, from some point on these numbers are all greater than the maximum of for . Likewise, , , , ... are a strictly decreasing sequence of integers, and from some point on they are all less than the minimum of for . This means that there cannot be infinitely many pairs with such that . The same argument applies if is decreasing for and .
Thus must be a polynomial of even degree. Now there exist integers and such that is increasing for and decreasing for , or vice versa. Thus there can only be infinitely many pairs with such that if one of the two is while the other is . We show that has to be constant for these solutions. Let the first terms of the polynomial be as follows:
Assume that is positive, for otherwise one can replace by . If , then we have
where the dots stand for terms involving lower powers of . For large enough , this will be strictly positive, so . Likewise, if , then we have
which is negative for large enough . Hence in this case as well. Thus there must be infinitely many solutions of with . In this case,
is a polynomial with infinitely many zeros, hence it is constant. Thus
for all , which gives
for all . It follows that the polynomial can only contain even powers of , i.e. . This gives us the second set of solutions, consisting of a polynomial of the form , where is an integer, and .