Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.8 AIME, harder Prove it

31. Find the greatest common divisor of the binomial coefficients (n1),(n2),,(nn1)\binom{n}{1},\binom{n}{2}, \cdots,\binom{n}{n-1}.

Solution

31. When n=pk,pn=p^{k}, p is a prime, the greatest common divisor is pp; in other cases, it is 11. For the case n=pkn=p^{k}, prove that p(nl),1ln1p \left\lvert\,\binom{ n}{l}\right., 1 \leqslant l \leqslant n-1, and p(npk1)p \|\binom{ n}{p^{k-1}}. Otherwise, use proof by contradiction. If the greatest common divisor d>1d>1, let pdp \mid d. Since dnd \mid n, we can set n=pkn1,pn1>1n=p^{k} n_{1}, p \nmid n_{1}>1, and prove that p(npk)p \nmid\binom{n}{p^{k}}, leading to a contradiction.

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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.