missing digit in a 114 digit number [a Riddler’s riddle]


A puzzling riddle from The Riddler (as Le Monde had a painful geometry riddle this week): this number with 114 digits


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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