Carry On
September 8, 2010
Imagine for a moment that you're a young child again, and you're just being taught how to add large numbers. Sure, you can do 5 + 3 = 8, but now they hit you with 5 + 6 = ?. You have just ten fingers, so counting on your fingers doesn't work, and the teacher might object to your taking your shoes off. Then they teach you about carrying digits, so you can compute 5 + 6 = 11, just like the big boys do. How simpler life would be if you didn't need to carry!
Well, that's the idea that Marc LeBrun of Fixpoint Inc.,Novato, CA, and David Applegate and Neil J. A. Sloane of AT&T Shannon Labs decided to investigate.[1] Neil J. A. Sloane may be known to many of you as the originator of the The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, something he started on index cards while a graduate student at Cornell University in 1965. These integer sequences have gone through publication twice in book form, finally developing a life of their own on the internet with 175,000 entries. If still printed in book form, the integer sequences would fill 750 volumes; and these volumes would not be very useful when it came to searching for your particular sequence.
In mathspeak, Addition and multiplication of single-digit numbers in a carryless arithmetic system are performed "reduction mod 10, meaning simply that the carry digits are ignored. Take, for example, this simple addition
7 8 5
and this simple multiplication
+3 7 6
0 5 1
6 4 3
You get the idea. The authors investigated the manifold consequences (pun intended) of this modulus type of arithmetic. We'll just summarize the idea of prime numbers. First, there can be no prime numbers in the usual sense, since all numbers in the carryless arithmetic system are divisible by nine. Here's the logic behind that
x 5 9
4 6 7
0 0 5
0 4 1 7