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Quentin L. Meunier
Associate Professor in Computer Science at Sorbonne Université

Problem 1018

François, a mathematician fascinated by large numbers, found one endowed with an astonishing property: if we write a "1" on the left and a "1" on the right of this positive integer having less than 100 digits, we get a number 99 times bigger than itself.

For question 1, 9 digits must appear in each box used. The three boxes are not necessarily to fill, there can be only one or two answers. If there are several answers to one of the two preceding questions, we will write the possible answers from left to right, in ascending order, stopping at the third if there are more than three.



We start by noticing that if a is the number searched for, writing a "1" on the left and right is the number 10 × a + 1 + 10Number of digits(a) + 1. If this number is equal to 99 × a, we have the equality: 1 + 10Number of digits(a) + 1 = 89 × a.
It is thus sufficient to check, for each number of digits a between 1 and 100, if the expression 1 + 10Number of digits(a) + 1 is divisible by 89.

The program, written in python for its native support for arbitrarily large integers, is available here.




  • 1A. The number of François terminates by 797752809.
  • 2A. 21. 2B. 65. The number has 21 or 65 digits.