For how many odd integers between 0 and 100 does the equation have exactly two pairs of positive integers that are solutions?
Solution
Step 1: Using parity and properties of powers of 2 to simplify the equation. We note that if for some real numbers and , then . We examine equations of the form where , and are integers. We may assume without loss of generality that and and . We factor the equation as , and then divide both sides by to obtain . We show that by contradiction: If , then gives . If , then , so , since is an integer. Therefore, the right side has a factor of , so the right side is even. Thus, the left side is even too, which means that must be an odd integer. For to be an odd integer, we must have and so or . In this case, the left side equals 2 and the right side is greater than 2, since and . This is a contradiction. Therefore, . Since , then becomes and so . Therefore, if with integers, then either or and (with ) or and (with . We examine these three possibilities in the given equation, noting that and are all positive integers: Case 1: . From the last equality, we obtain . Since are positive integers, then and . Since , then it must be that . Thus, implies or . But , so this case is not possible. Case 2: and and . From the second equality, we obtain , which is not possible since , and so . Therefore, this case is not possible. Case 3: and and . The first equality rearranges to . The second equality also rearranges to . The last statement is equivalent to . As we saw in Case 1, this means that cannot be the pair , which is consistent with and . Therefore, having examined all of the cases, we have reduced the original problem to finding the number of odd integers between 0 and 100 for which the equation has exactly two pairs of positive integers that are solutions. Step 2: Connecting solutions to with factorizations of . We can factor the left side of this equation to give . Since and are positive integers, then and so , or . Since is odd and each of and is an integer, then each of and is odd (since if either was even, then their product would be even). Also, we note that since . Suppose that is a solution of the equation with and for some odd positive integers and with . Then , so is a factorization of . Therefore, the solution corresponds to a specific factorization of . Now suppose that we start with a factorization where and are odd positive integers with . If we try setting and , then we can add these equations to give (or ) and subtract them to give (or ). Note that since , then . Therefore, every factorization of as the product of two odd positive integers and with gives a solution to the equation . Since each solution gives a factorization and each factorization gives a solution, then the number of solutions equals the number of factorizations. Therefore, we have reduced the original problem to finding the number of odd integers between 0 and 100 which have exactly two factorizations as the product of distinct odd integers and with . Step 3: Counting the values of . Since is odd, then all of its prime factors are odd. Since , then cannot have three or more distinct odd prime factors, because the smallest possible product of three distinct odd prime factors is . Thus, has two or fewer distinct prime factors. If for distinct primes , then the divisors of are , so has exactly two factorizations of the desired type (namely and ). Since and , then . Since is an integer, then . The odd primes less than 33 are . If , then , which is larger than 100. Therefore, can only be 3,5 or 7. If , there are 9 possible values for (primes from 5 to 31). If , there are 5 possible values for (primes from 7 to 19). If , there are 2 possible values for (11 and 13). Thus, there are values of of this form that work. If with and positive integers and at least one of or is larger than 1, then will have at least three factorizations. (For example, if , then and all of these are distinct.) If or with an odd prime, then has only one factorization as the product of distinct factors ( and , respectively). Thus, cannot be of this form. If with an odd prime, then the divisors of are , so it has exactly two factorizations of the desired type (namely and ). Since , then can only equal 3 (because ). Thus, there is 1 value of of this form that works. If with an odd prime, then the divisors of are , so it has exactly two factorizations of the desired type (namely and ). In this case, has a third factorization, but it is of the wrong type since the two factors will be equal. Since , then can only equal 3 (because ). Thus, there is 1 value of of this form that works. If has more than 4 factors of , then will have at least three factorizations of the desired type, so cannot be of this form. (In particular, if and , then and these are all distinct since .) Having examined all of the possible forms, we see that there are values of that work, and so there are 18 positive integer solutions to the original equation.