Maths Olympiad Prep

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Number theory Difficulty 5.4 AIME, harder Prove it

1. (MON 1) IMO4{ }^{\mathrm{IMO} 4} Given a set MM of 1985 positive integers, none of which has a prime divisor larger than 26, prove that the set has four distinct elements whose geometric mean is an integer.

Solution

1. Since there are 9 primes ( p1=2513p_{1}=2513 distinct two-element subsets of MM each having a square as the product of elements. Reasoning as above, we find at least one (in fact many) pair of such squares whose product is a fourth power.

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Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.