The Generalized Nagell-Ljunggren Problem: Powers with Repetitive Representations Andrew Bridy Robert J. Lemke Oliver Department of Mathematics Department of Mathematics Texas A&M University Tufts University Mailstop 3368 Medford, MA 02155 College Station, TX 77843-3368 USA USA robert.lemke
[email protected] [email protected] Arlo Shallit Jeffrey Shallit Toronto, Ontario School of Computer Science University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 Canada
[email protected] July 25, 2017 Abstract We consider a natural generalization of the Nagell-Ljunggren equation to the case where the qth power of an integer y, for q 2, has a base-b representation that consists ≥ of a length-ℓ block of digits repeated n times, where n 2. Assuming the abc conjecture arXiv:1707.03894v2 [math.NT] 22 Jul 2017 ≥ of Masser and Oesterl´e, we completely characterize those triples (q,n,ℓ) for which there are infinitely many solutions b. In all cases predicted by the abc conjecture, we are able (without any assumptions) to prove there are indeed infinitely many solutions. 1 Introduction Number theorists are often concerned with integer powers, with Fermat’s “last theorem” and Waring’s problem being the two most prominent examples. Another classic problem 1 from number theory is the Nagell-Ljunggren problem: for which integers n, q 2 does the Diophantine equation ≥ bn 1 yq = − (1) b 1 − have positive integer solutions (y, b)? See, for example, [36, 37, 31, 32, 39, 44, 28, 23, 10, 11, 14, 13, 45, 1, 9, 8, 12, 34, 15, 35, 7, 24, 27, 30, 2].