Let be a set consisting of positive integers, none of which is a sum of two other distinct members of . Prove that the elements of may be ordered as so that does not divide for all . (Ukraine)
Solution
We prove the following stronger statement. Claim. Let be a good set consisting of positive integers. Then the elements of may be ordered as so that and , for all . Proof. Say that the ordering of is nice if it satisfies the required property. We proceed by induction on . The base case is trivial, as there are no restrictions on the ordering. To perform the step of induction, suppose that . Let , and set . Use the inductive hypothesis to find a nice ordering of . We will show that may be inserted into this sequence so as to reach a nice ordering of . In other words, we will show that there exists a such that the ordering
is nice. Assume that, for some , the ordering is not nice, so that some element in it divides either the sum or the difference of two adjacent ones. This did not happen in the ordering of , hence (if, say, does not exist, then ; a similar agreement is applied hereafter). But the case is impossible: cannot divide , since , while by Observation A. Therefore . In this case, assign the number to the index . Suppose now that none of the is nice. Since there are possible indices , and only elements in , one of those elements (say, ) is assigned to two different indices, which then should equal and . This means that divides the numbers and , for some signs . But then
and therefore , which means that the ordering of was not nice. This contradiction proves the step of induction.