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Sunday, July 5, 2020

The many, many, many stars and a pinch of stripes for good measure

In the "Huh, that's neat ... I guess" category of number theory, the preamble to this week's Riddler Classic notes that the current number of states satisfies that N is double a square and that N+1 is a centered pentagonal number.

After 50, what is the next integer N with these properties?

After looking up the definition of a centered pentagonal number, it appears that they are of the form 1+nk=15k=1+5n(n+1)2. So the question states find the minimal N such that there exists integers n and m with N=2n2andN+1=5m(m+1)2+1. In particular, then we would have m2+m45n2=0 for some integers m,nN. Solving for m in terms of n we get m=1±1+165n22. In order for m to be an integer we would need 1+165n2 to be an odd integer, so in particular, we require that 5n.

So we can brute force check whether the conditions hold for each multiple of 5, until arriving at n=90, which gives 1+165n2=161 and a grand total of N=2(90)2=16,200. This seems like either we would need much bigger flags, or much smaller states to accommodate a flag with those specifications. And at what point on our walk from 51-ish states to 16,200 would we reconsider the convention of only having 13 stripes for the original colonies?

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