What is the least possible composite value of n 2 − n − 1 where n is a positive, prime integer?
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Great job!
This sucks. I was doing the math in my head going along the prime numbers and I was just on 13 and figured that it was a lost cause.
nice
can anyone explain what composite value means, because even google doesn't know
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A composite value is a number that can be expressed as the product of two or more primes. As an example, 2 6 is composite because it equals 2 ⋅ 1 3 , while 1 3 isn't composite (is prime).
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In simpler terms, it's just a number that isn't prime.
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@Finn Hulse – Wrong! Every number which isn't a prime, needn't be composite.
im sorry I have not been able to understand why you have focused on numbers ending with 3 ,only.
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coz if u take any other numbers, the resultant results have a lower possibility to be composite....
I'm not sure whether there's a better way of doing it, but when I first thought of this, I was trying to solve something else. If you factor this to n ( n − 1 ) − 1 , you're looking for 1 less than twice a triangular number. There must be other ways of solving this, because that's a stupid way. Yeah, but anyways, when I started trying out primes, none of them seemed to work! I thought I had discovered a property of primes, but then I tried 13. 1 6 9 − 1 3 − 1 = 1 5 5 which is composite. And that is the least possible value.
The way I did this was to find pairs of numbers 1 prime and 1 less than prime and just test them out to find one that works. Also since n(n-1) is always going to be even, the composite number must be odd. :P
13*13-13-1=155
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We know that when we square a number ending with 3 , the result is a number ending with 9 , which will be subtracted by the previous prime ending with 3 , and again subtracted by 1 , so the number will end with 5 . The smaller primes ending with 3 are 3 and 1 3 . But obviously, 3 doesn't works because it yields the prime 5 . So all we need is to check the primes 5 , 7 and 1 1 , and if they don't work, then the answer will be the substitution of 1 3 . They dont work, and hence the least composite result is 1 6 9 − 1 3 − 1 = 1 5 5 .