You can use the digits 1,2,and 3 once only and any mathematical symbols you are aware of, but no symbol is to be used more than once. The challenge is to see if you can make the largest numbers.

Here are some numbers to set the ball rolling: 321, 21to the third power, (3/.1)to the second power.

(levik: I guess this is more of a competition)

Haven't looked at the others, but yours gave me an idea. How about ((2/.1)^3)! -- that's a factorial, not a simple exclamation point.

That would be (20^3)! = (20x20x20)! = 8000! raise to the power of Pi too, if that's allowed before factorial.

That comes to ... holy cow, you broke my spreadsheet. There aren't enough bytes in a number to hold the answer apparently. The FACT() function didn't work, so I checked. Going backwards from 8000 down and multiplying it got to 7922 where the result was 1.501 x (10^300) But there are stilll the last 7921 numbers to multiply that against.

I need to a refresher and some more math courses, because I probably could have done something with natural logs here too.

Posted by Lawrence on 2003-08-31 00:10:16