Determine whether or not there exist positive integers and such that does not divide for all positive integers .
Solution
Solution 1. For all pairs of positive integers and , we claim that there exist infinitely many such that divides .
We establish our claim by strong induction on . The base case of holds trivially. Now, suppose that the claim holds for all . Since , by the induction hypothesis and by Lemma 1, there are infinitely many such that
For each such , set
It follows that
Then, we see that satisfies the desired property. By the induction hypothesis, there are infinitely many satisfying the conditions of the claim for , completing the induction.
Solution 2. We prove that no such exist by proving the following: for any , there is an arithmetic progression , with divisible only by primes less than or equal to the greatest prime factor of , such that for all sufficiently large satisfying .
Let us induct on highest prime divisor of . The result is trivial for . Let be a prime, and suppose that the result is true whenever all the prime divisors of are less than . Now, suppose that is the greatest prime divisor of some , and write , where has all prime factors less than . By the induction hypothesis, there is an arithmetic progression , with divisible only by primes strictly less than , such that for sufficiently large, . There is no harm in assuming that divides . In this case, in this arithmetic progression, is eventually constant modulo due to the lemma. We can thus choose a congruence modulo so that for an appropriate residue class modulo , . In this progression, is constant modulo , so we can refine our choice of modulo to a choice of modulo to force . We can then repeat the above process until we obtain . Since we originally had , combining the two congruences using the Chinese Remainder Theorem gives us for all sufficiently large in the congruence class generated at the last step. This completes the induction.