Prove that for every prime and every integer there exist two integers and such that divides .
Solutions — 2
Solution 1
Fix , and let be the set of residue classes modulo . For every , let , and let . Our aim is to prove for all .
We will use the well-known fact that for every residue class and every positive integer , there are at most values such that .
Lemma. Let be the number of quadruples for which . Then
and
Proof. (a) For each residue class there exist exactly pairs with and pairs with . So there are quadruples with . Taking the sum over all , the statement follows.
(b) Choose an arbitrary pair and look for the possible values of .
1. Suppose that , and let be the number of such pairs . The value can be chosen in different ways. For only has this property; for the nonzero values of there are at most 5 possible values for . So we have .
The values and must satisfy , so , and there are exactly such pairs .
2. Now suppose . In this case and must be distinct. By , the value of uniquely determines and thus and as well. Hence, there are suitable pairs .
Thus, for each of the pairs with there are pairs , and for each of the other pairs there are pairs . Hence,
To prove the statement of the problem, suppose that for some ; obviously . Let be the set of nonzero 10th powers modulo . Since each residue class is the 10th power of at most 10 elements in , we have by .
For every , we have . Indeed, if and then
so .
So, there are at least empty sets among , and there are at most nonzero values among . Then by the AM-QM inequality we obtain
which is impossible by the lemma.
Solution 2
If , then all modulo residue classes are complete fifth powers and the statement is trivial. So assume that where . Let be a primitive root modulo .
We will use the following facts:
(F1) If some residue class is not quadratic then .
(F2) For every integer , as a simple corollary of the summation formula for geometric progressions,
Suppose that, contrary to the statement, some modulo residue class cannot be expressed as . Of course . By (F1) we have for all residue classes .
For consider the sums
By the indirect assumption and (F2),
because cannot divide .
On the other hand, by the binomial theorem,
Since , the number divides only for and . Hence,
Taking this for and eliminating , we get
But in the last expression none of the numbers is divisible by , a contradiction.