login

Year-end appeal: Please make a donation to the OEIS Foundation to support ongoing development and maintenance of the OEIS. We are now in our 61st year, we have over 378,000 sequences, and we’ve reached 11,000 citations (which often say “discovered thanks to the OEIS”).

A298472
Numbers n such that n and n-1 are both nontrivial binomial coefficients.
0
21, 36, 56, 253, 496, 561, 1771, 2926, 3655, 5985, 26335, 2895621, 2919736, 6471003, 21474181, 48792381, 346700278, 402073903, 1260501229261, 12864662659597529
OFFSET
1,1
COMMENTS
Nontrivial here means binomial(r,s) with 2 <= s <= r-2 (or the sequence would be uninteresting).
Blokhuis et al. show that the values given are complete up to 10^30, and conjecture that there are no more.
LINKS
Aart Blokhuis, Andries Brouwer, Benne de Weger, Binomial collisions and near collisions, INTEGERS, Volume 17, Article A64, 2017 (also available as arXiv:1707.06893 [math.NT]).
EXAMPLE
binomial(6,3)=20 and binomial(7,2)=binomial(7,5)=21 are the smallest adjacent pair, so a(1)=21.
MATHEMATICA
nmax = 1000; t = Table[Binomial[n, k], {n, 4, nmax}, {k, 2, Floor[n/2]}] // Flatten // Sort // DeleteDuplicates; Select[Split[t, #2 == #1+1&], Length[#] > 1&][[All, 2]] (* Jean-François Alcover, Feb 20 2018 *)
CROSSREFS
Cf. A003015.
Sequence in context: A155710 A001491 A112352 * A168513 A067598 A043683
KEYWORD
nonn
AUTHOR
STATUS
approved