Find all right-angled triangles with integer side lengths whose areas are numerically equal to their perimeters.
Solution
Let be the side lengths of a right-angled triangle with hypotenuse , i.e. . The area of this triangle is equal to and the perimeter is . Area and perimeter agree exactly when . Squaring both sides and using Pythagoras, this becomes
We simplify this to
Because and are positive, we obtain , which is equivalent to
We may assume, w.l.o.g., that . If , then both factors, and , are between 0 and . The product of two such integers is never equal to 8. Hence, , which implies that is positive. Therefore, must be positive as well, hence .
The only factorisations of 8 in positive integers are and . We obtain in the first case, and in the second case. These lead to the right-angled triangles with side lengths 5, 12, 13 and 6, 8, 10. A straightforward check reveals that these are indeed solutions to this problem.