A278328 (#162)

Jonathan Frech, 11 March 2017

The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (also known by its acronym, OEIS) is a database hosting hundreds of thousands of — as the name implies — integer sequences. Yet, despite the massive number of entries, I contributed a new integer sequence, A278328.

A278328 describes numbers whose absolute difference to their decimal reverse are square. An example would be 12 or 21 (both are the decimal reverse to each other), since $\left|12-21\right|=9$ $\left|12-21\right|=9$ and $9=3^2$ $9=3^2$ .

Not a whole lot is known about the sequence⁠¹, partly due to its definition only resulting in the sequence when using the decimal system, though it is known that there are infinitely many numbers with said property. Since there are infinitely many palindromes (numbers whose reverse is the number itself), $\left|n-n\right|=0$ $\left|n-n\right|=0$ and $0=0^2$ $0=0^2$ .

Due to there — to my knowledge — not being a direct formula for those numbers, I wrote a Python script to generate them. On the sequence’s page, I posted a program which endlessly spews them out, though I later wrote a Python two-liner, which only calculates those members of the sequence in the range from 0 to 98 (shown below entered in a Python shell).

>>> import math
>>> filter(lambda n:math.sqrt(abs(n-int(str(n)[::-1])))%1 == 0, range(99))
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 21, 22, 23, 26, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40, 43, 44, 45, 48, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59, 62, 65, 66, 67, 73, 76, 77, 78, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 95, 98]

[1]	[2020-07-29] “Don’t know”, you know?