Ragged Clown

It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing…


Problem 12

June
2008

To save you going all the way to Project Euler to read it, I have copied problem 12 here for your puzzle solving convenience…

The sequence of triangle numbers is generated by adding the natural numbers. So the 7th triangle number would be 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 = 28.

The first ten terms would be:

1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45, 55, …

Let us list the factors of the first seven triangle numbers:

1: 1
3: 1,3
6: 1,2,3,6
10: 1,2,5,10
15: 1,3,5,15
21: 1,3,7,21
28: 1,2,4,7,14,28

We can see that 28 is the first triangle number to have over five divisors.

What is the value of the first triangle number to have over five hundred divisors?

In case you were wondering, the answer to problem 10 is


primes = Primes.new
puts primes.find_primes_less_than(2000000).inject{|s,n| s+n}

How come inject and collect haven’t caught on in other languages? They are awesome.