Friday, February 9th, 2007

hummingwolf: Mathemagical animation made out of string. (Incredible String Thing)
Now that half of you have been scared away by the subject line:

Okay, numbers which are the sums of the natural numbers from 1 through [whatever] are called triangular numbers. You can see why if you do a little dot drawing of, say, the sum of the numbers from 1 through 4:

*
**
***
****

The above shows you that 10 is a nice triangular number, which you already knew if you've ever been bowling. Other triangular numbers include 36 (the sum of the numbers from 1 through 8) and 666 (sum of numbers from 1 through 36).

Here's my question: Is there a general name for the numbers made up of sums of evenly-spaced numbers? Like the sum of all the odd numbers between 15 and 71, or the sums of the numbers in this series:
-23
-12
-1
10
21
32
43
54
65
etc.?

I've long known how to figure out what the values of the numbers are, but have no idea what to call them.

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