Monday, 3 November 2025

Exercise (2.4).13

Determine the following:

(a) $[2, 3, 5, 7]$

(b) $[24, 35, 51, 64]$

(c) $[11, 121, 132, 99, 77]$


(a) Since all of 2,3,5,7 are pairwise co-prime, we have

$$[2,3,5,7] = 2 \times 3 \times 5 \times 7 = 210$$


(b) We perform the prime decompositions as follows

$ 24 = 2^3 \times 3^1 $

$ 35 =  5^1 \times 7^1 $

$ 51 = 3^1 \times 17^1 $

$ 64 = 2^6 $

The LCM is therefore

$$  2^6 \times 3^1 \times 5^1 \times 7^1 \times 17^1 = 114240 $$


(c) We recognise that a common factor of the numbers is 11, and use $[ab,ac]=a[b,c]$ from exercise 7.

$$ [11, 121, 132, 99, 77] = 11 \times [1, 11, 12, 9, 7] $$

The prime decompositions of 11, 12, 9 and 7 are

$ 11 = 11^1 $

$ 12 = 2^2 \times 3^1 $

$ 9 = 3^2 $

$ 7 = 7^1$

So we have

$$\begin{align} [11, 121, 132, 99, 77] &= 11 \times [1, 11, 12, 9, 7] \\ \\ &= 11 \times 2^2 \times 3^2 \times 7^1 \times 11^1 \\ \\ & = 30492  \end{align}$$