I now resume the thread of spotting multiples of numbers easily. Thanks to the way positional notation lets us write out numbers as some multiple of our base, which is so nearly always ten it takes some effort to show where it’s not, it’s easy to spot whether a number is a multiple of that base, or some factor of the base, just by looking at the last digit. And if we’re interested in factors of some whole power of the base, of the ten squared which is a hundred, or the ten cubed which is a thousand, or so, we can find all we want to know just by looking at the last two or last three or last or-so digits.
Sadly, three and nine don’t go into ten, and never go into any power of ten either. Six and seven won’t either, although that exhausts the numbers below ten which don’t go into any power of ten. Of course, we also have the unpleasant point that eleven won’t go into a hundred or thousand or ten-thousand or more, and so won’t many other numbers we’d like.
If we didn’t have to use base ten, if we could use base nine, then we could get the benefits of instantly recognizing multiples of three or nine that we get for multiples of five or ten. If the digits of a number are some strand R finished off with an a, then the number written as Ra means the number gotten by multiplying nine by R and adding to that a. The whole strand will be divisible by nine whenever a is, which is to say when a is zero; and the whole strand will be divisible by three when a is, that is, when a is zero, three, or six.
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