What is the last digit of ?
Solution
Let be the last digit of a number ending in to the th power. For , we know that . All numbers ending in odd digits in this series are raised to odd powers; for odd or 7, or . All numbers ending in even digits are raised to even powers; for even or or 4. Further, for each last digit that has two possible values, the possible values will be present equally as often. Now define such that and for , so that the sum we want to calculate becomes . But by the above calculations all are divisible by 10, so their sum is divisible by 10, which means its last digit is 0.
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