Slow Day at Work

This is my slow week at the new job. I put out a couple of small fires by 10 am. I’m juggling three projects at the moment, but can’t do anything with them until I hear back from three different people. So it was a long, slow day.

I am also pretty much fed up with politics, so I avoid the click-bait, us-vs-them political websites that crowd the Internet. Looking for something different, I went to a couple of new math websites. Yes, math. And the first thing I saw was a challenge:

Prove that any two consecutive triangular numbers add up to a square number.

Hmmm.

I haven’t done a math proof in at least twenty-two years. Those algebraic corridors of my left brain are extremely rusted. Crumbling ferrous oxide rusted. But I (think I) figured it out, and it only took me thirty minutes and some basic algebra:

Now, most normal people out there will look at this as modern-day hieroglyphs. The few percent who actually know math will probably chuckle at how rookie the proof is. Me, I don’t know. I enjoyed it. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far from the truth to say that it was the best part of a long, slow day.