How many positive integers have the property that there exists a positive integer for which the last two digits in the decimal representation of is the same for all ?
Solution
Solution 1. It suffices to consider the remainder . We start with the four numbers that have the same last two digits when squared: . We can now go backwards, repeatedly solving equations of the form where is a number that already satisfies the condition. 0 and 25 together gives all multiples of 5, for 20 numbers in total. 1 gives , and 49 then gives . Similarly 76 gives , and 24 then gives , for 16 numbers in total. Hence there are such numbers in total. Solution 2. An equivalent formulation of the problem is to ask for how many elements of the map reaches a fixed point. We may separately solve this modulo 4 and modulo 25. Modulo 4, it is easy to see that all four elements work. Modulo 25, all multiples of 5 will work, of which there are 5. For the remaining 25 elements that are coprime to 5, we may use the existence of a primitive root to equivalently ask for how many elements of the map reaches a fixed point. The only fixed point is 0, so the only valid choices are the multiples of 5 again. There are solutions here. Finally, the number of solutions modulo 100 is .