How To Recognize Multiples Of 100 From Not So Far Away

MJ Howard last week answered my little demonstration that it was easy to tell multiples of two, five, and ten by looking at just the last digit of a whole number, but that there weren’t any ways to tell from just the last digit whether it was divisible by four. He pointed out we could look at the last two digits, and if those were divisible by four, then the entire number would be. This is perfectly true, and it’s only by asserting that I was looking for a rule based on the last digit alone that my forecast of doom about an instant check for divisibility-by-four could be sustained.

Remember the reasoning by which we wrote out a whole number as some string of digits which I call R followed by whatever goes in the units column, which I call a. (I had been thinking of R as in the “rest” of the number, but it struck me over the week that R is also the symbol used in organic chemistry to denote a chain of carbon atoms when one doesn’t really care how many of them are lined up. This interests me as I got on this thread with a set of numbers I called “alcoholic” due to their structural resemblance to organic chemistry’s idea of alcohols.) Since we’re writing in base ten, then, the number written as Ra is ten times R plus a. Ten times R can’t help being divisible by ten, or by any of the factors of ten, which are two and five (and one, which nobody cares about).