Let be a positive integer. Determine, in terms of , the greatest integer which divides every number of the form , where is a prime number which does not divide .
## Proposed by Bulgaria
Let be a positive integer. Determine, in terms of , the greatest integer which divides every number of the form , where is a prime number which does not divide .
## Proposed by Bulgaria
Let be the greatest such integer. We will show that when is odd and when is even.
We will say that a number is nice if is a prime number of the form which does not divide .
Note first that if for every nice number and so is a multiple of 3.
If is odd, then is nice, so we must have . From the previous paragraph we get that .
If is even, then is not nice, therefore every nice is of the form . So in this case for every nice number .
It remains to show that (if is even then)
(i) There is a nice such that .
(ii) There is a nice such that .
(iii) There is a nice such that for every prime we have that .
For (i), by Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions, there are infinitely many primes of the form . Any one of them which is larger than will do.
For (ii), by Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions, there are infinitely many primes of the form . Any one of them which is larger than will do.
For (iii), by Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions, there are infinitely many primes of the form . Any one of them which is larger than will do.
Remark. In the proposal, the statement of Dirichlet's theorem on Arithmetic Progressions was given as known. Even though this makes the problem fairer we omitted it because we feel that it also makes it easier.