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Working on isometric paths in hypercubes, I came up with the following simple, yet (imo) interesting problem. For what natural numbers $n$ exists a natural number $t$ such that $n^2+n+2=2^t$? The first few terms are $n=0,1,2,5,90$, and these are all below one million. Does someone have any idea how to approach this problem? I basically only want to know whether there exist infinitely many $n$ or not (maybe even that 0, 1, 2, 5, and 90 are the only possible ones).

Thanks,

Sacha

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    It is easily equivalent to a beautiful relation $ \sum_{i=1}^{n} i = \sum\limits_{j=1}^{t-1}2^j $2012-08-22

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That there are no more positive solutions was proved by Nagell, settling a conjecture of Ramanujan. The problem is discussed in this paper, and in this Wikipedia article.

To see that these solve the problem, a small preliminary transformation of your equation is useful. Rewrite it as $4n^2+4n+8=2^k$, and then as $(2n+1)^2+7=2^k$. We have arrived at the Ramanujan-Nagell equation.

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    @AndréNicolas : So basically there are only few solutions as in wikipedia article given right ?2012-08-23