Problems & Puzzles: Puzzles

 

 

Problems & Puzzles: Puzzles

Puzzle 1269 

 triangles with prime side lengths and vertices on lattice points.

On April 21, Oscar Volpatti sent the following puzzle.

For this puzzle, the only valid triangles are those whose three side lengths are prime numbers p,q,r (not necessarily distinct).

The task is to find valid triangles embedded in a given lattice; in other words, triangles whose three vertices are lattice points.

An infinite family of lattices is available: for each positive integer n there is a "n-dimensional integer lattice", denoted as Z^n, which is the set of all points with integer coordinates in n-dimensional Euclidean space.

Euclidean distance between lattice points A=(a_1,...a_n) and B=(b_1,...,b_n) is computed as usual:
d(A,B) = sqrt((a_1-b_1)^2 + ... + (a_n-b_n)^2).

The vertices of a proper triangle do not all lie on the same straight line, so lattice Z^1 must be discarded and the first few lattices to be considered are the "square lattice" Z^2 on the plane and the "cubic lattice" Z^3 in 3D space.

Answer the following questions.

Q1) Which valid triangles are embeddable in Z^2?
Q2) Which ones are embeddable in Z^3 but not in Z^2?
Q3) Which ones are embeddable in Z^4 but not in Z^3?
Q4) Which valid equilateral triangles are embeddable in some lattice Z^n?
Q5) Which valid triangles are embeddable in no lattice Z^n, no matter which value of n is chosen?
Q6) Is there some upper bound nmax such that any valid triangle embeddable in some lattice Z^n is also guaranteed to be embeddable in Z^nmax?

Some (non-valid) examples.
The rectangular triangle with side lengths 3,4,5 is easily embeddable in Z^2, by choosing vertices:
{(0,0),(4,0),(0,3)}.
The isosceles triangle with side lengths 4,7,7 is not embeddable in Z^2 but it's embeddable in Z^3, by choosing vertices:
{(0,0,0),(4,0,0),(2,3,6)}.

I hope that you'll find this puzzle interesting. It was partially inspired by puzzle 1155, also related to triangle searching and prime distances.


 






 

Records   |  Conjectures  |  Problems  |  Puzzles