Digit fifth powers: Euler Problem 30

Euler problem 30 is another number crunching problem that deals with numbers to the power of five. Two other Euler problems dealt with raising numbers to a power. The previous problem looked at permutations of powers and problem 16 asks for the sum of the digits of .

Numberphile has a nice video about a trick to quickly calculate the fifth root of a number that makes you look like a mathematical wizard.

Euler Problem 30 Definition

Surprisingly there are only three numbers that can be written as the sum of fourth powers of their digits:

As is not a sum, it is not included.

The sum of these numbers is . Find the sum of all the numbers that can be written as the sum of fifth powers of their digits.

Proposed Solution

The problem asks for a brute-force solution but we have a halting problem. How far do we need to go before we can be certain there are no sums of fifth power digits? The highest digit is and , which has five digits. If we then look at , which has six digits and a good endpoint for the loop. The loop itself cycles through the digits of each number and tests whether the sum of the fifth powers equals the number.

largest <- 6 * 9^5
answer <- 0
for (n in 2:largest) {
    power.sum <-0
    i <- n while (i > 0) {
        d <- i %% 10
        i <- floor(i / 10)
        power.sum <- power.sum + d^5
    }
    if (power.sum == n) {
        print(n)
        answer <- answer + n
    }
}
print(answer)

View the most recent version of this code on GitHub.

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