Let be positive integers such that has the same number of decimal digits as . What is the maximum value that can take?
Pick one
Solution
The answer is (A). The condition that has the same number of digits as implies that
Therefore we must have that
which is equivalent to stating that
In particular , from which we obtain . Let us now observe that if then has at least 3 digits, while has 2. Hence is at most 9, and it is easy to check that the triple satisfies the required conditions.
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