A fractional number is called ‘pretty’ if it has finite expression in base numeral system where is a positive integer in . Prove that there exists finite positive integers such that with every in , there is at least one pretty number among two numbers and .
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Solution
Call a positive integer 'good' if there exists that in the interval and is not pretty. Next, we will prove the following claims.
Claim 1. If is good then any multiple of is also good.
Proof. Consider a good number , there exists such that and are not pretty. Hence, is not a good number because are not pretty.
Claim 2. Consider a prime such that there exists a prime that . For all pairs with is prime and is positive integer such that , number is good.
Proof. Choose then . Assume that is pretty then there exists and finite non-negative integers that
which means .
Hence, all prime divisors of , except , are smaller than . On the other hand, is divisible for which implies that still has a prime divisor larger than and differs from , which is a contradiction. Therefore, is not pretty.
Continue, assume that is pretty. Similarly, only has prime divisors that are smaller than . Assume that there exists a prime number such that
which means and there exists that
Let where , the above equation becomes
Note that then . We also have then or , which means or , which is a contradiction.
Hence, both and are not pretty, or is good.
Back to the original problem, let be the number of the numbers that have the form and not exceed . We will point out that all positive integers is good. Assume that the prime factorization of is as follows
If for all then , a contradiction.
Therefore, there exists an index such that , which means is good by Claim 2. Hence, is the multiple of and is good by Claim 1. The problem is solved.