Fermat’s Riddle
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·A Fermat-like riddle from the Riddler (with enough room to code on the margin)
An arbitrary positive integer N is to be written as a difference of two distinct positive integers. What are the impossible cases and else can you provide a list of all distinct representations?
Since the problem amounts to finding a>b>0 such that
both (a+b) and (a-b) are products of some of the prime factors in the decomposition of N and both terms must have the same parity for the average a to be an integer. This eliminates decompositions with a single prime factor 2 (and N=1). For other cases, the following R code (which I could not deposit on tio.run because of the packages R.utils!) returns a list
library(R.utils) library(numbers) bitz<-function(i,m) #int2bits c(rev(as.binary(i)),rep(0,m))[1:m] ridl=function(n){ a=primeFactors(n) if((n==1)|(sum(a==2)==1)){ print("impossible")}else{ m=length(a);g=NULL for(i in 1:2^m){ b=bitz(i,m) if(((d<-prod(a[!!b]))%%2==(e<-prod(a[!b]))%%2)&(d<e)) g=rbind(g,c(k<-(e+d)/2,l<-(e-d)/2))} return(g[!duplicated(g[,1]-g[,2]),])}}
For instance,
> ridl(1456) [,1] [,2] [1,] 365 363 [2,] 184 180 [3,] 95 87 [4,] 59 45 [5,] 40 12 [6,] 41 15
Checking for the most prolific N, up to 10⁶, I found that N=6720=2⁶·3·5·7 produces 20 different decompositions. And that N=887,040=2⁸·3²·5·7·11 leads to 84 distinct differences of squares.
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