True or False?
There exists an integer such that the leading digits of are
You may use the fact that is irrational.
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
Claim: Given any string of digits N , there always exists an integer n such that n 2 has leading digits of N .
Proof: There exists a large enough integer m such that N + 1 − N > 1 0 − m . Then ( N + 1 ) × 1 0 2 m − N × 1 0 2 m > 1 . Hence, there exists an integer that is between these two numbers, or that
( N + 1 ) × 1 0 2 m > n ≥ N × 1 0 2 m
Squaring both sides of the inequality, we conclude that n 2 does indeed have leading digits N .
As an explicit example, to find an n such that n 2 has leading digits of 314159265359, we look at
3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 5 9 = 5 6 0 4 9 9 . 1 2 1 6 3 9 8 and 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 6 0 = 5 6 0 4 9 9 . 1 2 1 6 4 0 7 , with enough digits where they first disagree. This tells us that 56049912164 would satisfy the conditions, and indeed it does.