Scott–Styer's prime-base conjecture on solutions to a ternary purely exponential Diophantine equation

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Let aa, bb, and cc be distinct primes with a<ba<b, and let N(a,b,c)N(a,b,c) denote the number of solutions (x,y,z)∈N3(x,y,z)\in\mathbb{N}^3 to

ax+by=cz.a^x+b^y=c^z.

Scott–Styer's prime-base conjecture. We have N(a,b,c)≤1N(a,b,c)\leq1, apart from the six explicitly listed exceptional cases: (2,3,5)(2,3,5), (2,3,11)(2,3,11), (2,5,3)(2,5,3), (2,7,3)(2,7,3), (3,5,2)(3,5,2), and (3,13,2)(3,13,2), with the solution tuples given in the source statement. This restricted form is used in the paper because the prime-base setting makes the classification problem more tractable; the preceding theorems give substantial restrictions on any non-exceptional counterexample, but the conjecture itself remains open.

References

Primary source

Maohua Le, Reese Scott and Robert Styer, “On a conjecture concerning the number of solutions to a^x+b^y=c^z”, arXiv:2206.14032 (2022).

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