Find positive integer $x,y$ such that $$xy=2^x-1$$ I have made several attempts, but I don't know if this is totally correct: Notice that $x$ never divides $2 ^ x-1$.
Claim: There is no positive integer greater than $1$ such that $x$ divides $2^x-1$. We can assume that $\frac{2^x-1}{x}$ is an integer, and now we can consider the polynomial $$p(x)=\left(x-\frac{2^x-1}{x}\right)(x-1)x$$ After some algebraic manipulation we obtain $$x^3-x^2-x(2^x-1)+(2^x-1)=0$$ We know that one of the solutions is $0$ but we ignore this because $x$ is never equal to $0$. By Vieta's formula we have that the sum of other two solutions is $1$, but this is a contradiction because we supposed that $\frac{2^x-1}{x}\geq1$, because $x\geq1$. So that unique solution is $(1,1)$ Do you think it is correct? And if so, are there alternative solutions to this? Is it possible to find a way to do this by induction or infinite descent? Thanks