falzoon's folly ....

Consider the set S S of all (non-degenerate) triangles that meet the following two conditions:

(i) the side lengths are consecutive positive integers;

(ii) the area is integer valued.

What is the area of the third-smallest triangle in S S ?

(Credit goes to the mysterious falzoon for this question.)


The answer is 1170.

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1 solution

Patrick Corn
Sep 2, 2014

If the sides are n 1 , n , n + 1 n-1, n, n+1 , then the area is n 4 3 ( n 2 4 ) \frac{n}4 \sqrt{3(n^2-4)} by Heron's formula. Clearly n n must be even, say n = 2 a n = 2a . Then we get an area of a 3 ( a 2 1 ) a\sqrt{3(a^2-1)} . So a 2 1 = 3 b 2 a^2-1=3b^2 for some integer b b and the area is 3 a b 3ab . The first three solutions of the Pell equation a 2 3 b 2 = 1 a^2-3b^2 = 1 are ( a , b ) = ( 2 , 1 ) , ( 7 , 4 ) , ( 26 , 15 ) (a,b) = (2,1), (7,4), (26,15) , which leads to n = 4 , 14 , 52 , n = 4, 14, 52, \ldots . The third triangle has area 3 26 15 = 1170 3 \cdot 26 \cdot 15 = \fbox{1170} .

Thanks for such an elegant, concise solution, Patrick. I used the Pell's approach as well but my solution was going to be a mess compared to yours, so I'm glad I hadn't started typing it out yet.

Brian Charlesworth - 6 years, 9 months ago

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Who is falzoon?

Bogdan Simeonov - 6 years, 9 months ago

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He is a member of another math website that I used to participate on. He was always posting weird and wonderful questions for us to try and solve. Michael Mendrin posted another one of falzoon's questions here .

Brian Charlesworth - 6 years, 9 months ago

these are all heronian triangles

Ashu Dablo - 6 years, 9 months ago

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