2013 AMC 12B Problems/Problem 25
Problem
Let be the set of polynomials of the form
where
are integers and
has distinct roots of the form
with
and
integers. How many polynomials are in
?
$\textbf{(A)}\ 288\qquad\textbf{(B)}\ 528\qquad\textbf{(C)}\ 576\qquad\textbf{(D}}\ 992\qquad\textbf{(E)}\ 1056$ (Error compiling LaTeX. Unknown error_msg)
Solution
If we factor into irreducible polynomials (in ), each factor
has exponent
in the factorization and degree at most
(since the
with
come in conjugate pairs with product
). Clearly we want the product of constant terms of these polynomials to equal
; for
, let
be the number of permitted
with constant term
. It's easy to compute
,
,
,
,
,
, and obviously
for negative
.
Note that by the distinctness condition, the only constant terms that can be repeated are those with
and
, i.e.
and
. Also, the
s don't affect the product, so we can simply count the number of polynomials with no constant terms of
and multiply by
at the end.
We do casework on the (unique) even constant term in our product. For convenience, let
be the number of ways to get a product of
without using
(so only using
) and recall
; then our final answer will be
. It's easy to compute
,
,
,
,
,
, so we get