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Sylvester's Postage Stamp Problem

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What is the greatest positive integer such that the Diophantine equation has no solution in non-negative integers? If and are relatively prime numbers, the equation has a solution in integers for any integer and has a solution in non-negative integers for any integer greater than .

Contributed by: Izidor Hafner (December 2012)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

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J. J. Sylvester (1814–1897) posed the problem of finding the largest number that cannot be made up of some combination of 5p and 17p stamps.

Reference

[1] D. Wells, The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Puzzles, New York: Penguin Books, 1993 p. 64.

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