Monday, September 10, 2018

Splitting naturals into arithmetic progressions

The set of natural numbers $\{1,2,\dots\}$ is split into finite number of arithmetic progressions with common differences $d_1 \le d_2 \le \dots \le d_n$

Show that $$d_{n} = d_{n-1}$$

Eg: $\{4n+1\}, \{4n+3\}, \{2n\}$

Here $d_1 = 2, d_2 = d_3 = 4$.

2 comments:

  1. Peiyush, did you come up with this problem?

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    1. Hey!

      This version maybe, but variants of this are well known.

      There is at least one proof (the well known case) which applies to this problem, but IIRC this problem had a simpler proof which I do not recollect.

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