What is a Lychrel number? What are its applications?
In: Mathematics
the wikipedia page explains it fairly well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lychrel_number
its a number where reversing it and adding it to its self repeatedly never becomes a palindrome (symetric string). for example 437, reverse it, and you get 734, add 437 and you get 1171, repeat to get 1711+1171= 2882, a palindrome 28|82, so it is not a Lychrel number
196 (first 4 itterations are 887, 1675, 7436, 13783) might be, but none have actually been proved.
as for a use, who knows. we dont know if any actually exist. I would guess there is no use, but mathematics has a habit of making up “useless” concepts that turn out to be unexpectedly useful 100 years later
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