Thread: Diophantine eqn

Find all integral pairs (x,y) that satisfy


x^3 - y^3 = xy + 61


thanx in advance

Originally Posted by debanik1

Find all integral pairs (x,y) that satisfy

It looks as though there are only two solutions.

Factorise the left side:

Let . Then (1) becomes



Complete the square to write this as



Since k is a nonzero integer, , and so the large parenthesis on the left side of (3) must be positive. Hence so also is k, or in other words .

Thus if x is negative then so is y. But if (x,y) is a solution of (1) then so is (–y,–x). It follows that we only need to look for solutions where x is positive. Write the original equation as



It is clear from (4) that if x is positive then the only negative values that y can take are –1, –2 or –3. But it is easily checked that none of these leads to an integer solution of (4). We are left with the situation where each of the integers x, y and k in (2) is positive. It is then easily verified that the only way for the terms on the left of (2) to add up to 61 is if x=6 and y=5.

Therefore the only solutions to the original equation are (x,y) = (6,5) and (x,y) = (–5,–6).