Find all natural numbers for which there exists an integer such that for all positive divisors of .
Solution
Answer: is prime or a power of two (including ).
Indeed, if is an odd prime, then the only divisor is . Choose with , for example . Then we need to check that is a divisor of . This is the difference between two terms that both have exactly factors of 2, so the difference has at least factors of 2.
In the second case, we have with . If , then there are no positive divisors , so the condition holds because the requirement is vacuously true. Note also that gives the even prime 2. For all divisors , we now observe that
is zero for all . Thus, is a multiple of , or in other words, . This checks both cases.
Now suppose that is neither a prime nor a power of two. Then we can write as with odd (since is not a power of two) and (since is not a prime). Since , the above calculation now implies that . This means that is a power of two, so for some implies but this implies that . Thus, this square is -1 modulo 4, which is impossible. If is odd, then we observe that
Since , is strictly less than . The second factor in this product is a sum of an even number of terms with the parity of and a 1, so this factor is odd. Since the second factor is also greater than 1, this contradicts the fact that it must be a divisor of the power of two .