Let ; ; and ; ; be two arithmetic progressions. The set is the union of the first terms of each sequence. How many distinct numbers are in ?
Pick one
Solution
The two sets of terms are and .
Now . We can compute . We will now find .
Consider the numbers in . We want to find out how many of them lie in . In other words, we need to find out the number of valid values of for which .
The fact "" can be rewritten as ", and ".
The first condition gives , the second one gives .
Thus the good values of are , and their count is .
Therefore , and thus .
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