A188892 Numbers n such that there is no triangular n-gonal number greater than 1.

11, 18, 38, 102, 198, 326, 486, 678, 902, 1158, 1446, 1766, 2118, 2918, 3366, 3846, 4358, 4902, 5478, 6086, 6726, 7398, 8102, 8838, 9606, 10406, 11238, 12102, 12998, 13926, 14886, 15878, 16902, 17958, 19046, 20166, 21318, 22502, 24966, 26246

Offset: 1

Author

T. D. Noe, Apr 13 2011

Keywords

• nonn

Comments

It is easy to find triangular numbers that are square, pentagonal, hexagonal, etc. So it is somewhat surprising that there are no triangular 11-gonal numbers other than 0 and 1. For these n, the equation x^2 + x = (n-2)*y^2 - (n-4)*y has no integer solutions x>1 and y>1.

Chu shows how to transform the equation into a generalized Pell equation. When n has the form k^2+2 (A059100), then the Pell equation has only a finite number of solutions and it is simple to select the n that produce no integer solutions greater than 1.

The general case is in A188950.

Links

• Robert Israel, Table of n, a(n) for n = 1..10000
• Wenchang Chu, Regular polygonal numbers and generalized pell equations, Int. Math. Forum 2 (2007), 781-802.

Crossrefs

Cf. A051682 (11-gonal numbers), A051870 (18-gonal numbers), A188891, A188896.

Programs

Maple

filter:= n -> nops(select(t -> min(subs(t,[x,y]))>=2, [isolve(x^2 + x = (n-2)*y^2 - (n-4)*y)])) = 0:
select(filter, [seq(t^2+2,t=3..200)]); # Robert Israel, May 13 2018