Saturday, 24 September 2016

Solving a Diophantine equation of the form x2=ay2+byz+cz2 with the constants a,b,c given and x,y,z positive integers



Is there any procedure for determining if an infinite amount of solutions exist for an equation of the type x2=ay2+byz+cz2 for arbitrary integer constants a,b,c and variables x,y,zZ+? If not, does knowing at least one non-trivial solution of the equation help determine if an infinite amount of solutions exist?



Example (if it helps): let x2=202y2+14yz+9z2. Here one solution is y=z=1 and x=15, do there exist infinitely many other solutions?


Answer



TLDR; If there exists one nonzero solution, then there exist infinitely many solutions, paramatrized by Z2. Popular candidates to test are triplets (0,y,z) where yc and za, though such solutions need not exist.







Every integral solution to your equation with x0 yields a rational solution to
aY2+bYZ+cZ2=1,
by setting Y:=yx and Z:=zx. Conversely, every rational solution to this equation yields an integral solution to your equation by multiplying out the denominators. This also shows that multiplying an integral solution through by an integer yields another integral solution.



Given a nonzero rational solution (Y0,Z0) to your equation, also
(aY0+bZ0,aZ0),
is a rational solution, and moreover for every kZ also
((aY0+bZ0)k2+2cZ0kcY0,aZ0k2+2cY0k+bY0+cZ0),
is a rational solution. These are in fact all rational solutions. This then in turn yields all integral solutions, except those with x=0. For these we have

Y=b±b24ac2aZ,
so such solutions exist if and only if b±b24ac2a are rational, i.e. if and only if ax2+bx+c has a rational root, which is easy to test.


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