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The "Soup" Theorem : When Erdős Met Pósa

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Edited by Richard Walker, Saturday 14 November 2026 at 23:42

The renowned mathematician Paul Erdős told this story about the 12-year-old Louis Pósa

While Pósa was eating his soup, I asked him the following question. Prove that if you have n + 1 positive integers less than or equal to 2n, some pair of them are relatively prime.

Here's the very neat proof Pósa came up with in about half a minute. I like it because it uses a sort of reverse pigeonhole principle.

Imagine we have n boxes and we put the two times n integers into the boxes like this

1 comma 2 3 comma 4 ellipsis 2 n minus 1 comma 2 n

Now we try to choose the n plus one integers. Since we want more integers than there are boxes we are bound to empty at least on box and so our selection will include a pair of consecutive integers.

But a pair of consecutive integers, say k and k plus 1 must always be relatively prime; that have no common factor greater than one , because any such factor of k would leave a remiander of one when divided into k plus 1.

For more about Pósa see his Wikipedia biography.

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