Gelfand’s question

Posted on 19 June 2013 by John

Gelfands’s question asks whether there is a positive integer n such that the first digits of jn base 10 are all the same for j = 2, 3, 4, …, 9. (Thanks to @republicofmath for pointing out this problem.) This post will explore Gelfand’s question via probability. The MathWorld article on Gelfand’s question says that […]

Leading digits of factorials

Posted on 19 October 2011 by John

Suppose you take factorials of a lot of numbers and look at the leading digit of each result. You could argue that there’s no apparent reason that any digit would be more common than any other, so you’d expect each of the digits 1 through 9 would come up 1/9 of the time. Sounds plausible, […]