A B C and fractions

1 c = 1 a + 1 b \large \frac{1}{c} = \frac{1}{a} + \frac{1}{b}

How many possible positive integers c < 100 c<100 are there such that the equation above has precisely 9 positive integer solution pairs ( a , b ) (a,b) ?


Try another problem on my set! Warming Up and More Practice


The answer is 32.

This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and, finally, (c) loading the non-javascript version of this page . We're sorry about the hassle.

1 solution

Jon Haussmann
Jul 17, 2017

From the equation 1 c = 1 a + 1 b , \frac{1}{c} = \frac{1}{a} + \frac{1}{b}, we get a b = b c + a c ab = bc + ac . We can re-write this equation as ( a c ) ( b c ) = c 2 . (a - c)(b - c) = c^2. The positive solutions to this equation are of the form ( a , b ) = ( m + c , n + c ) (a,b) = (m + c, n + c) , where m n = c 2 mn = c^2 . Thus, the number of solutions is equal to the number of divisors of c 2 c^2 .

Thus, we want to find the c c so that the number of divisors of c 2 c^2 is 9. There are two kinds of solutions: c = p q c = pq , where p p and q q are distinct primes, and c = p 4 c = p^4 , where p p is prime.

The solutions of the form p q pq are 6, 10, 14, 22, 26, 34, 38, 46, 58, 62, 74, 82, 86, 94, 15, 21, 33, 39, 51, 57, 69, 87, 93, 35, 55, 65, 85, 95, 77, and 91. The solutions of the form p 4 p^4 are 16 and 81. This gives us a total of 32 solutions.

@Jon Haussmann , we really liked your comment, and have converted it into a solution. If you subscribe to this solution, you will receive notifications about future comments.

Brilliant Mathematics Staff - 3 years, 10 months ago

0 pending reports

×

Problem Loading...

Note Loading...

Set Loading...