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Number of solutions to a special type of unit equations in two unknowns

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Number of solutions to a special type of unit equations in two unknowns
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28
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CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 2.0 Generic:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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For any fixed coprime positive integers a, b and c with min{a, b, c} > 1, we prove that the equation $a^{x}+b^{y}=c^{z}$ has at most two solutions in positive integers x, y and z, except for one specific case which exactly gives three solutions. Our result is essentially sharp in the sense that there are infinitely many examples allowing the equation to have two solutions in positive integers. From the viewpoint of a well-known generalization of Fermat’s equation, it is also regarded as a 3-variable generalization of the celebrated theorem of Bennett [M.A.Bennett, On some exponential equations of S.S.Pillai, Canad. J. Math. 53(2001), no.2, 897–922] which asserts that Pillai’s type equation $a^{x}-b^{y}=c$ has at most two solutions in positive integers x and y for any fixed positive integers a, b and c with min {a, b} > 1. In this talk we give a brief summary of corresponding earlier results and present the main improvements leading to this definitive result.
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