Is there a direct proof of this lcm identity?

Solution 1:

Consider Leibniz harmonic triangle — a table that is like «Pascal triangle reversed»: on it's sides lie numbers $\frac{1}{n}$ and each number is the sum of two beneath it (see the picture).

One can easily proove by induction that m-th number in n-th row of Leibniz triangle is $\frac{1}{(n+1)\binom{n}{m}}$. So LHS of our identity is just lcd of fractions in n-th row of the triangle.

But it's not hard to see that any such number is an integer linear combination of fractions on triangle's sides (i.e. $1/1,1/2,\dots,1/n$) — and vice versa. So LHS is equal to $lcd(1/1,\dots,1/n)$ — and that is exactly RHS.

Solution 2:

More generally, for $0 \leq k \leq n$, there is an identity

$(n+1) {\rm lcm} ({n \choose 0}, {n \choose 1}, \dots {n \choose k}) = {\rm lcm} (n+1,n,n-1, \dots n+1-k)$.

This is simply the fact that any integer linear combination of $f(x), \Delta f(x), \Delta^2 f(x), \dots \Delta^k f(x)$ is an integer linear combination of $f(x), f(x-1), f(x-2), \dots f(x-k)$ where $\Delta$ is the difference operator, $f(x) = 1/x$, and $x = (n+1)$.