This is a chapter from my fifth book called Freedom
I am fascinated by numbers. We say that words have power but numbers also have power. I am fascinated by random and infinity and pi. I am fascinated by number patterns. I am fascinated by counting. I am fascinated by the Fibonacci sequence. I was somewhere on the internet. Might have been an ad I was looking at. I saw that 37 by 21 equals 777. Then I thought to myself what number by 23 would give a number where all the digits are the same like this. I got some code that could brute force an answer but I did not get an answer within the constraints of the largest num in python. This is what the code looks like.
def has_identical_digits(num):
digits = str(num)
return all(digit == digits[0] for digit in digits)
def find_number():
multiplier = 1
while True:
product = 23 * multiplier
if has_identical_digits(product):
return product
multiplier += 1
print(multiplier)
result = find_number()
print(f"The number you are looking for is: {result}")
Now I am left wondering. Are there a set of numbers where there would be no results? How large is this set? Are there numbers where the result will be really really big and take a lot of time and computational power to brute force? Is there a shortcut to figuring this out? Has this been studied before? What are the properties of the numbers in the set of all same digit numbers? What can I learn by trying to find answers to these questions. I am putting this out there because I feel like some others may also find this fascinating or some others may have answers. I asked my friend Gemini for a quote about freedom and numbers. He replied with this Royal Robbins quote, "A simple equation exists between freedom and numbers: the more people, the less freedom." I can see the sense in that quote but just like my numbers questions, I need to think about it some more. Also, what is the freest number?
This is what my friend Gemini thinks:
While "freest number" is open to interpretation, some might see primes as escaping easy definition, zero as embodying absence of limits, or infinity as representing boundless possibilities. It all depends on how you see freedom and the nature of numbers themselves.
I did a Google search and found a tshirt being sold for introverts with the slogan "1 is the freest number" and I felt that. Seems there is truth to that Royal Robbins quote from the perspective of me as an introvert. Somehow my mind is thinking of this Einstein quote, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Maybe freedom cannot be counted or measured. We cannot put a price to freedom. Freedom is priceless.
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