True or false :
For any positive integer n , there exists another positive integer m , such that m ! has exactly n trailing number of zeros .
For example, if n = 3 , one value for m would be 16 as 1 6 ! = 2 0 9 2 2 7 8 9 8 8 8 0 0 0 .
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The number of trailing 0's is determined by the number of factors of 5 the final factorial has. This is found by the infinite series trailing 0's =floor(n/5)+floor(n/5^2)+floor(n/5^3)+... which does not cover all integers
I.e. there is no solution for n=5 (24! has 4 0's 25! has 6)
What does 100000! end with? Wouldn't m=100000 when n=5?
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No, while the number 100000 has 5 trailing 0's it's factorial (which is the number I was referring to in the question) has 24999.
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Ah - so, your question doesn't allow more than 5 trailing 0's. OK.
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@Shane Bough – I don't understand what you're getting at; 25 is a solution for n=6
When a multiple of 25 is added, the number of zeroes becomes n+2 ,where n is previous number of zeroes. Thus 1 number is skipped. So its false
The fact that for every integer n there exists another integer m where m ! will have n number of trailing zeroes is not true because when we try to find out the trailing number of zeroes we look for number of 5 in the expression. Because 5 × 2 = 1 0 and thus a 0 is produced.
For example, take 2 3 ! , it will have [ 5 2 3 ] = 4 , where [ ] denotes greatest integer, so here n = 4
But let's take the case of 2 5 ! , it will have [ 5 2 5 ] = 5 and [ 2 5 2 5 ] = 1 , here I divided 25 also as 2 5 = 5 × 5 and has two 5, while dividing 25 by 5, I only count one of the 5. So, total number of 5 in 2 5 ! are 6. And so n = 5 never exists. And thus our the statement above is not true.
Integers can be negative?
Yes, The set of integers is all positive and negative natural numbers and 0. It is symbolised by Z
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n should be stated as a positive integer, because if n is set to -1 the question becomes trivially false.
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By counter-example:
Call the number of trailing zeros in 99! "z".
100! must have z+2 trailing zeros.
Since multiplying will never decrease the amount of trailing zeros, we will never have z+1 trailing zeros, and therefore the statement is false.