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Korean Mathematical Olympiad Final Round

South Korea number theory

Problem

Determine a polynomial with integer coefficients which satisfies the following property: There are infinitely many relatively prime positive integers such that divides .
Solution
Let be such a polynomial. Define Then is a polynomial consisting of odd degree monomials of , is a polynomial consisting of even degree monomials of (including the constant term), and . For any positive integers and , since for any nonnegative integer , we have Hence we may assume that . Suppose that for a nonnegative integer and for some positive integers . Note that Hence Furthermore if , . Therefore , which implies that there exist only finitely many such positive integer pairs . Now assume that , where and is a nonzero polynomial consisting of monomials of even degrees greater than . Let be any sufficiently large positive integer such that and be any positive integer such that Note that and there exist infinitely many such integer pairs . Since , we have . Therefore satisfies the above property if and only if contains no even degree monomials (that is, it consists of odd degree monomials only) or contains at least two even degree monomials.
Final answer
Exactly those integer-coefficient polynomials whose even-degree part is either zero (so the polynomial has only odd-degree terms) or has at least two nonzero even-degree terms; equivalently, exclude polynomials whose even part consists of a single even-degree monomial.

Techniques

Greatest common divisors (gcd)Polynomial operations