Xi'an's Og

As pointed out by Jean-Louis Foulley in his comment on the recent Le Monde puzzle [#1063] post, the questions are heavily inspired by the 2018 high school final exam (known as Le Baccalauréat or Le Bac’) in mathematics in France, as can be checked from the above. Including the denomination of powerful number! In Part A, the students had to study the Diophantine equation x²-8y²=1 (E) and show it had an infinite number of (integer) solutions. While these students did not have access to computing facilities, question 1 was solved by sheer enumeration, providing 8=2³ and 9=3² as an answer. While (2) and (3) are rather straightforward, using the prime number decomposition of a and b for (2), the fact that x² and 8y² are powerful for (3). Brute force search leading to x=99,y=35 for the final question.

This entry was posted on August 21, 2018 at 12:18 am and is filed under Kids with tags Baccalauréat, Diophantine equations, Le Monde, mathematical puzzle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.