Articles from September, 2009

Patterns in the Last Digits of the Positive Powers of Two

By Rick Regan (Published September 27th, 2009)

The positive powers of two — 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, … — follow an obvious repeating pattern in their ending digit: 2, 4, 8, 6, 2, 4, 8, 6, … . This cycle of four digits continues forever. There are also cycles beyond the last digit — in the last m digits in fact — in the powers of two from 2^m on. For example, the last two digits repeat in a cycle of length 20 starting with 04, and the last three digits repeat in a cycle of length 100 starting with 008.

In this article, I will show you why these cycles exist, how long they are, how they are expressed mathematically, and how to visualize them.

Nines in Quinary

By Rick Regan (Published September 8th, 2009)

In my article “Nines in Binary”, I proved the following: positive integers of the form 10ⁿ-1, that is, integers made up of n digits of 9s, have binary representations with exactly n digits of trailing 1s. Pat Ballew made a clever observation, adapting my result to prove an equivalent statement for base 5 (quinary): positive integers of the form 10ⁿ-1 have quinary representations that have exactly n digits of trailing 4s. For example, 9999 in decimal is 304444 in quinary.

In “Nines in Binary”, I derived an expression for 10ⁿ – 1 that shows its structure as a binary number:

10ⁿ – 1 = (5ⁿ – 1) 2ⁿ + (2ⁿ – 1)

Pat derived a similar expression for 10ⁿ – 1 that shows its structure as a quinary number:

10ⁿ – 1 = (2ⁿ – 1) 5ⁿ + (5ⁿ – 1)

In essence, he swapped the 2s and 5s, making it the “dual” of my formula, if you will.

I’ll show the details of the derivation and prove why the formula works.

Finding Numbers That Are Palindromic In Multiple Bases

By Rick Regan (Published September 1st, 2009)

A palindromic number, or number palindrome, is a number like 74347, which is the same written forward and backward.

A number can be palindromic in any base, not just decimal. For example, 101101 is a palindrome in binary. A number can also be palindromic in more than one base, like decimal 719848917, which is 101010111010000000010111010101 in binary and 5272002725 in octal.

An efficient way to find palindromes in a single base is to generate them, iterating through each integer and constructing palindromes from them. An efficient way to find numbers that are palindromic in multiple bases is to take a palindrome in one base and test if it’s a palindrome in one or more additional bases.

In this article, I’ll show you C code I wrote that finds multi-base numeric palindromes. I used this code to generate tables of numbers that are palindromic in decimal and binary, decimal and hexadecimal, and decimal and octal. I also used this code to solve Euler problem 36, which asks for the sum of all numbers, less than one million, that are palindromic in decimal and binary.