Problem #31
A collection of balls is stacked as follows. The top layer
consists of 2 balls, the second layer consists of a 2 x 3 rectangular
array of balls, the third a 3 x 4 array, etc. The balls in one row sit in
the "dimples" in the row beneath. The first three layers are shown in the
figure below:
- If there are 100 layers in the stack, what is the total number of
balls?
- If each ball has a radius of 1 inch, how high is the stack?
- Can you generalize to the case where there is a 1 x n
rectangle of balls in the first row, a 2 x (n+1) rectangle in the
second, etc., with a total of m layers?