Congratulations to Felix Reiter from Bottisham Village College for successfully solving this problem!
The key idea here is to split our problem into cases.
To solve the problem of finding two coprime integers and
such that
, we consider cases based on the properties of
:
Case 1: is odd
Write for some integer
.
Choose: ,
.
Since and
are consecutive integers, they are coprime.
Case 2: is even and divisible by
Write for some integer
.
Choose: ,
.
These differ by , so their only possible common factor is
, but both are odd, so they are coprime.
Case 3: is even but not divisible by
Write , where
is odd.
Choose: ,
.
These differ by , so their only possible common factors are
or
, but
is odd, so
and
are both odd and coprime.