A puzzling riddle from The Riddler (as Le Monde had a painful geometry riddle this week): this number with 114 digits
530,131,801,762,787,739,802,889,792,754,109,70?,139,358,547,710,066,257,652,050,346,294,484,433,323,974,747,960,297,803,292,989,236,183,040,000,000,000
is missing one digit and is a product of some of the integers between 2 and 99. By comparison, 76! and 77! have 112 and 114 digits, respectively. While 99! has 156 digits. Using WolframAlpha on-line prime factor decomposition code, I found that only 6 is a possible solution, as any other integer between 0 and 9 included a large prime number in its prime decomposition:

However, I thought anew about it when swimming the next early morning [my current substitute to morning runs] and reasoned that it was not necessary to call a formal calculator as it is reasonably easy to check that this humongous number has to be divisible by 9=3×3 (for else there are not enough terms left to reach 114 digits, checked by lfactorial()… More precisely, 3³³x33! has 53 digits and 99!/3³³x33! 104 digits, less than 114), which means the sum of all digits is divisible by 9, which leads to 6 as the unique solution.
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This entry was posted on January 31, 2019 at 12:19 am and is filed under R, Running, Statistics with tags FiveThirtyEight, lfactorial(), mathematical puzzle, prime factor decomposition, R, The Riddler, Wolfram Research, WolframAlpha. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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