Euler Problem 1 Definition

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Solution

There are four ways to solve this problem in R.

1. Brute force loop through all numbers from 1 to 999 and test whether they are divisible by 3 or by 5 using the modulus function.
2. Vector arithmetics.
3. Sequences of 3 and 5, excluding duplicates (numbers divisible by 15).
4. Using an arithmetic approach.

By the way, the problem definition on the Project Euler website is not consistent: the title mentions multiples of 3 AND 5, while the description asks for multiples of 3 OR 5.

# Solution 1
answer <- 0
for (i in 1:999) {
    if (i%%3 == 0 | i%%5 == 0) 
        answer <- answer + i
}

# Solution 2
sum((1:999)[((1:999)%%3 == 0) | ((1:999)%%5 == 0)])

# Solution 3
sum(unique(c(seq(3, 999, 3), seq(5, 999, 5))))

The sum of an arithmetic progression , where n is the number of elements and a₁ and a_n are the lowest and highest value, is:

The numbers divisible by can be expressed as:

We can now easily calculate the sum of all divisors by combining the above progression with the formula for arithmetic progressions as expressed in the above code, where m is the divisor and n<\i> the extent of the sequence.

# Solution 4
SumDivBy <- function(m, n) {
    p <- floor(n/m)*m # Round to multiple of n
    return (m*(p/m)*(1+(p/m))/2)
}

answer <- SumDivBy(3, 999) + SumDivBy(5, 999) - SumDivBy(15, 999)