A polynomial is called nice if and the nonzero coefficients of alternate between and when written in order. Suppose is nice, and let and be two relatively prime positive integers. Show that
is nice as well.
Solution
is a polynomial, so is as well.
We now establish a lemma giving an alternate characterization of nice polynomials.
Lemma 2. If is a polynomial with constant term 1, then is nice if and only if each nonzero term in the power series expansion of has coefficient 1.
Proof. Suppose that . Notice that the power series of has coefficients
given by the partial sums of the coefficients of . (In particular, this means that the coefficients of the power series of are eventually constant.) Because , we have .
Now, if is nice, then because the nonzero coefficients of alternate between 1 and , the partial sums of the coefficients of take value either 0 or 1. This means exactly that , hence all non-zero coefficients of the power series for are equal to 1, as desired.
On the other hand, if , we see that . Explicitly, this means that
Because takes at most two values, among for which , the first and last cases alternate, which implies exactly that is nice. This completes the proof of the lemma.
We now turn to the problem proper. Because , it follows that . Thus, by Lemma 2, it suffices to show that all nonzero terms in the power series for
have coefficient 1. Again by Lemma 2, all nonzero terms in the power series of have coefficient 1, so the same is true for . Further, all the nonzero terms of the power series expansion of have exponents congruent to 0 modulo . Now, because and are relatively prime, is a polynomial whose nonzero coefficients are equal to 1 and whose nonzero terms have exponents with distinct residues modulo . Therefore, each nonzero term in the power series expansion of may be expressed in a unique way as the product of a nonzero term in the power series of and a nonzero term in , hence each such term has coefficient 1. So is nice by Lemma 2.