2005 USAMO Problems/Problem 2
Contents
Problem
(Răzvan Gelca) Prove that the system
has no solutions in integers
,
, and
.
Solution
It suffices to show that there are no solutions to this system in the integers mod 19. We note that , so
. For reference, we construct a table of powers of five:
Evidently, then the order of 5 is 9. Hence 5 is the square of a multiplicative generator of the nonzero integers mod 19, so this table shows all nonzero squares mod 19, as well.
It follows that , and
. Thus we rewrite our system thus:
Adding these, we have
\[(x^3+y+1)^2 - 1 + z^9 &\equiv -6,\] (Error compiling LaTeX. Unknown error_msg)
or
By Fermat's Little Theorem, the only possible values of
are
and 0, so the only possible values of
are
, and
. But none of these are squares mod 19, a contradiction. Therefore the system has no solutions in the integers mod 19. Therefore the solution has no equation in the integers.
Solution 2
Note that the given can be rewritten as
(1) ,
(2) .
We can also see that
.
Now we notice
for some pair of non-negative integers . We also note that
when
when . If
or
then examining (1) would yield
which is a contradiction. If
then from (1) we can see that
, plugging this into 2 yields
. We can now see that
. Furthermore, notice that
for a pair of positive integers means that
which cannot be true. We now know that
.
Suppose that
which is a contradiction. Now suppose that
.
We now apply the lifting the exponent lemma to examine the power of 3 that divides each side of the equation to obtain
.
For we can see that
which is a contradiction. Therefore there are no solutions to the given system of diophantine equations.
See also
- <url>Forum/viewtopic.php?p=213009#213009 Discussion on AoPS/MathLinks</url>
2005 USAMO (Problems • Resources) | ||
Preceded by Problem 1 |
Followed by Problem 3 | |
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