Maths Olympiad Prep

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Number theory Difficulty 5.3 AIME, harder Find the answer

How many positive integers 2a1012 \leq a \leq 101 have the property that there exists a positive integer NN for which the last two digits in the decimal representation of a2na^{2^{n}} is the same for all nNn \geq N ?

A number or a short expression. Spacing and $ signs are ignored.

Solution

Solution 1. It suffices to consider the remainder mod100\bmod 100. We start with the four numbers that have the same last two digits when squared: 0,1,25,760,1,25,76. We can now go backwards, repeatedly solving equations of the form x2n(mod100)x^{2} \equiv n(\bmod 100) where nn is a number that already satisfies the condition. 0 and 25 together gives all multiples of 5, for 20 numbers in total. 1 gives 1,49,51,991,49,51,99, and 49 then gives 7,43,57,937,43,57,93. Similarly 76 gives 24,26,74,7624,26,74,76, and 24 then gives 18,32,68,8218,32,68,82, for 16 numbers in total. Hence there are 20+16=3620+16=36 such numbers in total. Solution 2. An equivalent formulation of the problem is to ask for how many elements of Z100\mathbb{Z}_{100} the map xx2x \mapsto x^{2} reaches a fixed point. We may separately solve this modulo 4 and modulo 25. Modulo 4, it is easy to see that all four elements work. Modulo 25, all multiples of 5 will work, of which there are 5. For the remaining 25 elements that are coprime to 5, we may use the existence of a primitive root to equivalently ask for how many elements of Z20\mathbb{Z}_{20} the map y2yy \mapsto 2 y reaches a fixed point. The only fixed point is 0, so the only valid choices are the multiples of 5 again. There are 5+4=95+4=9 solutions here. Finally, the number of solutions modulo 100 is 4×9=364 \times 9=36.

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Source: Omni-MATH, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.