Problem:
A positive integer is called triangular if it can be written in the form for some positive integer . How many pairs of triangular numbers are there such that ? (Recall that 223 is a prime number.)
Problem:
A positive integer is called triangular if it can be written in the form for some positive integer . How many pairs of triangular numbers are there such that ? (Recall that 223 is a prime number.)
Solution:
There are 6 pairs of triangular numbers that satisfy the required condition. The problem is equivalent to finding the pairs of positive integers such that
Indeed, since different values of determine different values of , determining the triangular numbers and is equivalent to determining the values of and that generate them.
Clearing denominators and factoring, the equation becomes
Since and hence , must also be positive. The equation then represents a way of writing as a product of two positive integers. But the only ways of splitting as a product of two positive integers are obtained by "distributing" its prime factors in all possible ways between the two integers, that is, explicitly
- 1 and ;
- 2 and ;
- 3 and ;
- and ;
- and ;
- and 223
Since , is always the smaller of the two factors of the pair. Letting and , we must then be in one of the following cases:
- ;
- ;
- ;
- ;
- ;
- .
Now solving the system
in the unknowns and we obtain
Note that substituting into the equations the six values of corresponding to the six possible cases, one finds each time a pair of acceptable values (that is, integer and positive: indeed we always have , and, since has only one factor of 2, in all cases exactly one of and is even, and therefore and are always even). For all six of these pairs, by the way they were obtained, we have , and therefore all of them are solutions of the original equation. Moreover the six cases presented exhaust all the possibilities, so there are no other solutions. Explicitly the solutions are:
- ;
- ;
- ;
- ;
- ;
-
(note however that the exercise does not ask to explicitly determine the solutions, but only to say how many there are).