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Added reference to Liouville
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François Brunault
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The question is not trivial, and to my knowledge the answer is not known: there is no known uniform upper bound for the $p$-adic valuation of $(p-1)!+1$ (although such a bound most probably exists, as you indicate).

The only result I know in this direction is that $(p-1)!+1$ is not a power of $p$ for any $p>5$, see e.g. this link. EDIT. I have in my notes that this result is due to Liouville, but I cannot find the precise reference.

This does provide an upper bound for the $p$-adic valuation, although a very weak one. A natural problem would be to improve this bound, but a uniform upper bound may be out of reach given current technology.

The question is not trivial, and to my knowledge the answer is not known: there is no known uniform upper bound for the $p$-adic valuation of $(p-1)!+1$ (although such a bound most probably exists, as you indicate).

The only result I know in this direction is that $(p-1)!+1$ is not a power of $p$ for any $p>5$, see e.g. this link.

This does provide an upper bound for the $p$-adic valuation, although a very weak one. A natural problem would be to improve this bound, but a uniform upper bound may be out of reach given current technology.

The question is not trivial, and to my knowledge the answer is not known: there is no known uniform upper bound for the $p$-adic valuation of $(p-1)!+1$ (although such a bound most probably exists, as you indicate).

The only result I know in this direction is that $(p-1)!+1$ is not a power of $p$ for any $p>5$, see e.g. this link. EDIT. I have in my notes that this result is due to Liouville, but I cannot find the precise reference.

This does provide an upper bound for the $p$-adic valuation, although a very weak one. A natural problem would be to improve this bound, but a uniform upper bound may be out of reach given current technology.

Source Link
François Brunault
  • 20.8k
  • 2
  • 53
  • 102

The question is not trivial, and to my knowledge the answer is not known: there is no known uniform upper bound for the $p$-adic valuation of $(p-1)!+1$ (although such a bound most probably exists, as you indicate).

The only result I know in this direction is that $(p-1)!+1$ is not a power of $p$ for any $p>5$, see e.g. this link.

This does provide an upper bound for the $p$-adic valuation, although a very weak one. A natural problem would be to improve this bound, but a uniform upper bound may be out of reach given current technology.