Some Fun Ways to Write Numbers but Complicated

I have a delightful trifle for you today. It is, like a couple of other arithmetic games, from a paper by Inder J Taneja, who has a wonderful eye for this sort of thing. It’s based on the sort of puzzle you might use to soothe your thoughts: how can you represent a whole number, using the string of digits 1 through 9 in order, and the ordinary arithmetic operations? That is, something like 12 x 34 – 56 + 7⁸ ÷ 9? (If that would be a whole number.) Or in reverse order: 987 – 65 x 4 ÷ 3² + 1? (Again, if that’s a whole number.)

Dr Taneja has a set of answers for you, with the numbers from 0 through 11,111 written as strings of increasing and of decreasing digits. Here’s the arXiv link to the paper, for those who’d like to see the answers.

There is one missing number: Dr Taneja could find no way to produce 10,958 using the digits in increasing order. I imagine, given the paper was last updated in 2014, that there’s not a way to do this without adding some new operation such as factorials or roots, into the mix. Still, some time when you need to think of something soothing? Maybe give this a try. You might surprise everyone.