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(I've taken this from MSE, it seems to be more appropriate here)

I'm rereading an older text on fermat-quotients (see wikipedia) from which I have now the

Question for $$ b^{p-1} \equiv 1 \pmod{ p^m} \qquad \text{ with $p \in \mathbb P $, $1 \lt b \lt p$ and $m \gt 2$} $$ (This is a generalization of the question for Wieferich primes).

Note that I ask here for examples, where the bases $b$ are smaller than the prime $p$, so a very well known weaker case $3^{10} \equiv 1 \pmod {11^2 } $ were an example, but only if the exponent at $11$ where one more; however frequent and well known cases like $18^6 \equiv 1 \pmod {7^3} $ were not because the base is bigger than the prime.

The only example that I've found so far is $$ 68^{112} \equiv 1 \pmod {113^3 } $$ but I've scanned only the first 2000 primes $p \in (3 \ldots 17389)$ and my primitive brute force algorithm has more than quadratic time-characteristic, so checking 10 000 or 100 000 primes were no fun - the quadratic regression prognoses 1 hour for testing 10 000 primes and 101 hours for testing 100 000 primes...

I'm aware of a couple of webpages containing lists of fermat quotients up to much higher primes, but either there is no explicite mention of the cases of $b \lt p$ and quotient $m \gt 2$ or I've been too dense when scanning through the listings (Richard Fischer, Wilfrid Keller, Michael Mossinghoff)


For reference: my Pari/GP-code is

for(j=2,2000,p=prime(j);p3=p^3;
    for(k=2,p-1,
        r = lift(Mod(k,p3)^(p-1));
        if(r==1,print(p," ",k," ",r)));
    );

(One correspondent took this up to the 10 000'th prime which is $p=104729$ )


[update] For the later casual reader I've included a more involved explanation and a table of data. See here (filesize 2Mb, inconvenient for modem-transfer)

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    $\begingroup$ Cases b<p can be easily identified in Fischer's table fermatquotient.com/FermatQuotienten/FermatQ3 and there no other for primes below 3.6*10^8. $\endgroup$ Dec 7, 2013 at 1:52
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    $\begingroup$ The question is discussed in MR2114655 (2005i:11004) Keller, Wilfrid; Richstein, Jörg; Solutions of the congruence $a^{p-1}\equiv1\pmod{p^r}$, Math. Comp. 74 (2005), no. 250, 927–936 but I don't think any solutions are found, other than the one you already have. Still, the paper might be worth a look, to see what's been done. $\endgroup$ Dec 7, 2013 at 4:34
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks to Max and Gerry for the links - I could access them both and also got the article of Keller/Richstein. $\endgroup$ Dec 7, 2013 at 5:16
  • $\begingroup$ @Max : if you would like to convert your comment into an answer I could mark that as accepted which would then "close the case"... $\endgroup$ Dec 7, 2013 at 15:39

1 Answer 1

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Cases with $b<p$ can be easily identified in Fischer's table https://www.fermatquotient.com/FermatQuotienten/FermatQ3.txt and there are no other such instances for primes below $1.1\cdot 10^9$ (updated 2024-03-13).

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