Floyd's triangle

Floyd's triangle is a triangular array of natural numbers used in computer science education. It is named after Robert Floyd. It is defined by filling the rows of the triangle with consecutive numbers, starting with a 1 in the top left corner:

1
23
456
78910
1112131415

The problem of writing a computer program to produce this triangle has been frequently used as an exercise or example for beginning computer programmers, covering the concepts of text formatting and simple loop constructs.

Properties

Centered square numbers, highlighted in red, are in found in the center of the odd rows, and are the sum of successive squares – taking 25 as an example, it is the sum of 16 (rotated yellow square) and the next smaller square, 9 (sum of blue triangles)
  • Summing up the row sums in Floyd's triangle reveals the doubly triangular numbers, triangular numbers with an index that is triangular.
  • Each number in the triangle is smaller than the number below it by the index of its row.

See also

References

Uses material from the Wikipedia article Floyd's triangle, released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.