Blog Post #114: All roads lead to Armstrong number!

This post is around working towards a common team goal and the path that we take to achieve that - have made an attempt to explain that through Armstrong numbers

Let's start this blog listing out the Armstrong numbers that most of us know about - 0, 1, 153, 370, 371 and 407 (Sum of the cubes of the digits equal to the number)

Now let's take a random number say 504 and add up the cubes of the digits till we get to see what happens after few steps!

Step 1:            5 ^ 3 + 0 ^ 3 + 4^ 3 = 189

Step 2:            1 ^ 3 + 8 ^ 3 + 9 ^ 3 = 1242

Step 3:            1 ^ 3 + 2 ^ 3 + 4 ^ 3 + 2 ^ 3 = 81

Step 4:            8 ^ 3 + 1 ^ 3 = 513

Step 5:            5 ^ 3 + 1 ^ 3 + 3 ^ 3 = 153!!

153 is an Armstrong number and the iteration stops here!!! That's sheer magic - Isn't it?

Let's take another number 841

Step 1:            8 ^ 3 + 4 ^ 3 + 1 ^ 3 = 577

Step 2:            5 ^ 3 + 7 ^ 3 + 7 ^ 3 = 811

Step 3:            8 ^ 3 + 1 ^ 3 + 1 ^ 3 = 514

Step 4:            5 ^ 3 + 1 ^ 3 + 4 ^ 3 = 190

Step 5:            1 ^ 3 + 9 ^ 3 + 0 ^ 3 = 730

Step 6:            7 ^ 3 + 3 ^ 3 + 0 ^ 3 = 370

370 is an Armstrong number and iteration stops here!!

Moral of the story

When we work as a team to deliver an outcome, we all strive towards a common goal (which is the Armstrong number in this case) though the paths we take may sometime differ (as we saw in the two examples above)

Not all numbers behave this way but it is an interesting exercise to see which ones follow this pattern!