Thread: Problem 46
View Single Post
  #9  
Old February 9th, 2009, 09:02 PM
chiph588@'s Avatar
chiph588@ chiph588@ is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Illinois
Posts: 172
Country:
Thanks: 66
Thanked 42 Times in 38 Posts
chiph588@ will become famous soon enough
Default

Proof by contradiction: Assume f(x) is a polynomial with integer roots.

First note that f(0) is the product of all the roots and f(1) is the sum of coefficients.

Let f(x) = (x-r_1) \cdots (x-r_n), where r_1, \cdots , r_n are all the roots to f(x).

So f(0) = \prod_{i = 1}^n (-r_i) and since f(0) is odd, this implies each r_i is odd too.

But f(1) = \prod_{i = 1}^n (1-r_i) and since f(1) is odd, this implies that each 1-r_i is odd which implies each r_i is even.

Hence a contradiction and therefore there are no integer solutions.