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Wed, 30 Sep 2009

Optimising n! - revisited again

For the background, see this post and this post.

I have had An Branewave! When I said that

  100! = 250 * 333 * 520 * 714 * 119 * ...

was wrong (which it is) I stupidly didn't realise that there is a pattern to the missing terms. The 250 comes from observing that there a 50 multiples of 2 less than or equal to 100. There are also 25 multiples of 4 (also known as 22), 12 multiples of 8 (aka 23), 6 multiples of 24, 3 multiples of 25, and 1 of 26. the 25 multiples of 4 contribute another 225. The 12 multiples of 8 (which of course are also multiples of 4) contribute another 212, and so on.

So we see that 100! is divisible by 250 + 25 + 12 + 6 + 3 + 1, or 297.

There is, of course, a similar pattern for all the other prime factors.

Posted at 01:44 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | maths
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