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Factorial Removal Remix (Posted on 2024-11-29) Difficulty: 3 of 5
N = (1!)*(2!)*(3!)*(4!)*.....*(21!)*(22!).

Precisely 2 of the 22 factorials needs to be removed from N to make it a perfect square.

What two factorials need to be removed? Provide adequate reasoning for your answer.

No Solution Yet Submitted by Brian Smith    
Rating: 4.0000 (1 votes)

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Some Thoughts Possible Solution | Comment 1 of 3
The powers will be very large, so some lateral thinking is needed.
In the overall factorisation, each natural number, n, up to 22, will occur in f= (22-n+1) factorials.
e.g. 2 will occur in 21 factorials, 3 in 20, and 22 will occur in 1.

If f is even, we are done, because the overall of repeats is even, giving an even power. In this puzzle, this includes every odd n, including odd primes.
If n is itself a square, then all of its repeats will also be squares. Hence we can ignore 3,4,5,7,9,11,13,15,16,17,19, and 21. Then we count the number of prime repeats in the remaining numbers,n.
e.g. 2 will occur in 2,6,8,10,14,18,22. (In 12 and 20, 2 occurs to an even power)
This is 7 occasions, so 2 will occur to an overall odd power.
3 and 5 occur an even number of times so are even powers.
7 occurs once (14) so is odd.
11 occurs once (22) so is odd. 
So we desire to even up 2,7,11.
An obvious candidate is 11!=2^8×3^4×5^2×7×11
This deals with 7 and  11 but not 2.
Happily, 2! = 2 so we can remove that.
This should leave a perfect square (whatever it is) as desired.

So the two factorials are 2! and 11!


Edited on November 29, 2024, 11:26 am
  Posted by broll on 2024-11-29 11:08:02

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