Let be a prime number. How many monic polynomials are there in of degree that have exactly distinct roots, and whose coefficients are all distinct and non-zero?
Problem 902
Official solution
Let be a polynomial satisfying the statement. cannot have 0 as a root, so has all roots between 1 and , except 1, denoted by . Thus,
Among the candidates to satisfy the statement, it remains to verify those that have pairwise distinct non-zero coefficients. If has pairwise distinct coefficients, then since is monic, the order of modulo is at least , so by Fermat, the order is exactly . In particular, is a primitive root. Conversely, if is a primitive root, are distinct modulo , so works.
Thus, there are as many polynomials as there are primitive roots modulo , i.e., .