How many positive integers that satisfy the property that and start with the same digit?
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Notice that 2 n ⋅ 5 n = 1 0 n .
Let's write 2 n and 5 n in scientific notation.
Now, 2 n = c 1 ⋅ 1 0 k 1 , 5 n = c 2 ⋅ 1 0 k 2 , where 1 ≤ c 1 , c 2 < 1 0 .
Since 2 n and 5 n start with the same digit, c 1 and c 2 must have the same integer part, and thus c 1 = x + f 1 , c 2 = x + f 2 , where x is an integer, f 1 is the fractional part of c 1 and f 2 is the fractional part of c 2 .
Since 2 n ⋅ 5 n = 1 0 n ⟹ c 1 ⋅ c 2 = ( x + f 1 ) ⋅ ( x + f 2 ) = x 2 + ( f 1 + f 2 ) x + f 1 f 2 = 1 0 , we know that x = 3 is the only solution because 0 < f 1 , f 2 < 1 .
Hence, both 2 n and 5 n must start with 3 .
First n which satisfies the property is 5 .
We get the next candidate by adding 1 0 to the previous n .
That is the next possible n , since when we look at powers of 2 , 2 1 0 = 1 0 2 4 is the lowest power of 2 which written in scientific notation has the coefficient between 1 and 3 4 . (This is because we want the next candidate to start with 3 )
Using the above we see that 1 5 satisfies this property, but 2 5 doesn't.
Now we repeatedly add 1 0 to the n (exponent) until we reach a power of 2 which when written in scientific notation has the coefficient over 8 3 0 (This is because we want to lower the candidate little bit since repeatedly multiplying by 1 0 2 4 increased the value too much.), since 8 = 2 3 has the coefficient closest to 1 0 of all powers of 2 below 1 0 2 4 .
When we reach such n , we add 3 to it and we have our next candidate.
Using this approach, we get that following positive integers n ≤ 2 0 0 satisfy the property: 5 , 1 5 , 7 8 , 8 8 , 9 8 , 1 0 8 , 1 1 8 , 1 8 1 , 1 9 1 .
Hence, the answer is 9 .