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Baltic Way shortlist

Baltic Way number theory

Problem

An infinite set consisting of non-negative integers has the following property. For each () the number . Prove that contains all non-negative integers. Here is the greatest common divisor of numbers and .
Solution
If is the greatest common divisor of all the numbers in set , let . Then for each () we have Observe that the greatest common divisor of the set equals , therefore we can find a finite subset for which . We may think that the sum of elements of is minimal possible. Choose numbers () and replace in the set with . The greatest common divisor of the obtained set equals . But the sum of numbers decreases by this operation, which contradicts the minimality of .

Thus, . Therefore all the numbers in the set have residue modulo . Take an arbitrary and . Then by and hence . But , therefore , so is divisible by . But , therefore is also divisible by , hence (that means that ). Thus we have checked that if then . Then all non-negative integers belong to because it is infinite.

Techniques

Greatest common divisors (gcd)Invariants / monovariants