Let be the set of positive integers. Find all functions such that:
Solution
The striking thing about this problem is that the relation concerns divisibility rather than equality. How can we exploit this? We are given that but we can certainly add or subtract multiples of the left hand side from the right hand side and preserve the divisibility. This leads to a key idea:
'Eliminate one of the variables from the right hand side.'
Clearly so for any we have
This feels like a strong condition: if we fix and let go to infinity, then will have arbitrarily large factors, which implies it must be zero.
We must be careful: this argument is fine, so long as the function takes arbitrarily large values. (We also need to check that satisfies the original statement which it does.)
We are left with the case where takes only finitely many values.
In this case must take the same value infinitely often, so it is natural to focus on an infinite set such that for all . If then the original statement gives where is fixed and can be as large as we like.
Now we recycle our key idea and eliminate from the right.
so for arbitrarily large . This means that so , since it must be positive.
At this point we suspect that for all is the only bounded solution, so we pick some such that and try to get a contradiction.
In the original statement we can set and get . Eliminating from the right gives us nothing new, so how can we proceed? Well, we have an infinite set such that is constantly 1 on so we can take to obtain
Using our key idea one more time and eliminating from the right, we get for arbitrarily large which is impossible if .
A rather different solution can be found by playing around with small values of and .
As before it helps to establish but now gives .
The left is bigger than the right, so the right must be zero .
Now try and obtain . Subtracting the left from the right gives . Since the left is a factor of -6 which is bigger than 2 . This gives or .
In the first case we can plug this back into the original statement to get . Now taking two copies of the left away from the right we have .
Thus must a factor of -3 which is bigger than 2 , so for any .
Before proceeding with the case we take another look at our strong result . Setting gives so taking away from shows that
Let see if we can use and to pin down the value of , using .
From we have and from we have . The second of these shows is 1,3 or 9 , but 1 and 3 are too small to work in the first relation.
Similarly, setting in gives while in gives . The latter shows so . The only possible multiples of 13 are 0 and 13 , of which only the first one works. Thus .
Now we are ready to try induction. Assume and use and to obtain and . The latter implies so the former becomes . If then since any other multiple would be too large. However, putting into implies . This is a contradiction since is coprime to and clearly cannot divide .
for all .