[Math] Strong Induction to find all possible combinations of two numbers

discrete mathematicsinduction

Full disclosure, this is a homework question, so I'm only looking for hints not full solutions please.

There is a store which offers two denominations of gift certificates, \$25 and \$40. Determine the possible total amounts that can be formed using the certificates, using strong induction to prove your answer.

My first approach was to write out something like this, let $S$ be a possible amount where $S = 25a + 40b$ and $a, b \in \mathbb{Z}^+$ ($0$ being included in the positive integers). The problem is that I'm not sure how to use this as a propositional statement for strong induction.

Second, I tried to make a table to find a pattern, like this:
$$
\begin{array}{c|ccccc}
0 & 0 & 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 \\
\hline
0 & 0 & 25 & 50 & 75 & 100 \\
1 & 40 & 65 & 90 & 115 & 140 \\
2 & 80 & 105 & 130 & 155 & 180 \\
3 & 120 & 145 & 170 & 195 & 220 \\
4 & 160 & 185 & 210 & 235 & 260 \\
\end{array}
$$

The issue with this approach was that, once again, I could see no particular path towards using strong induction (or any discernible pattern).

I'm not sure how best to move forward, and I haven't been able to find many helpful resources. I'd be very grateful for some help, thanks!

Best Answer

First, let us "scale down" the problem by a factor of $5$, i.e., that we are working with $5$ and $8$ gift certificates. We will "scale up" our solution afterwards.

Notice that $5$ and $8$ are coprime and thus their non-negative integer linear combinations form a numerical semigroup with two generators. A nice result of numerical semigroups with two generators $m,n$ is that any number bigger than $mn-m-n$ is in the semigroup.

To show this by induction for this particular problem, notice that $mn-m-n = 8*5-8-5 = 27$ is the largest number that can't be written as a positive integer linear combination of $5$ and $8$. Thus, the next $5$ numbers ($28,29,30,31,32$) can be written as a linear combination of $5$ and $8$, this will form your base case. See if you can explicitly find the linear combinations of $5$ and $8$ that will give you those five numbers. Now, consider $n>32$ and suppose that $k$ can be written as a positive integer linear combination of $5$ and $8$ for all $28 \leq k < n$. We want to show the same holds for $n$. Notice that $28 \leq n-5 < n$ and thus $n-5 = 5a+8b$ for $a,b\in \mathbb{Z}^+$. From this, we see that $n= 5(a+1)+8b$ and thus we can write $n$ as a positive integer linear combination of $5$ and $8$, thus completing the induction.

We still need to check the values less than $28$ which we can do by brute force. We see that we can get the following with positive integer linear combinations of $5$ and $8$ for numbers less than $28$, $$\{ 0,5,8,10,15,16,18,23,24,25,26\}.$$

Scaling our solution up by $5$, we can obtain the following amounts: $$\{0,25,40,50,75,80,90,115,120,125,130\} \cup \{140, 145,150,\dots\}$$

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