I have to confess to treating triangular numbers with some complacency over the years. Let's recall that triangular numbers are of the form:
1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45, 55, 66, 78, 91, 105, 120, 136, 153, 171, 190, 210, 231, 253, 276, 300, 325, 351, 378, 406, 435, 465, 496, 528, 561, 595, 630, 666, 703, 741, 780, 820, 861, 903, 946, 990, 1035, 1081, 1128, 1176, 1225, 1275, 1326, 1378, 1431
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Figure 1: Triangular numbers appear in Pascal's Triangle. In fact 3rd diagonal of Pascal's Triangle, gives all triangular numbers as shown |
Similarly I've grown rather complacent about happy numbers that have the property that repeated iterations of the sum of digits squared lead to 1. For example:
It turns out however, that numbers that are both triangular and happy are rather rare. These types of numbers comprise OEIS A076712 and the initial members of the sequence are:
1, 10, 28, 91, 190, 496, 820, 946, 1128, 1275, 2080, 2211, 2485, 3321, 4278, 8128, 8256, 8778, 9591, 9730, 11476, 12090, 12880, 13203, 13366, 13530, 15753, 16471, 17205, 17578, 20910, 21115, 21321, 22791, 24753, 25651, 27261, 29890, 30135, 31626, 33670, 35245
As can be seen, it will be quite some time before I meet the next such number: 29890. The main reason for creating this post was to draw attention to an interesting website titled Fascinating Triangular Numbers run by Shyam Sunder Gupta. It was begun on October 26th 2002 but remains active. There is a plethora of information on this site about various properties of triangular numbers so it's a wonderful resource.
What follows are just two examples from the site:
Example 1: The only known example of a Pythagorean triangle (
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