login

Year-end appeal: Please make a donation to the OEIS Foundation to support ongoing development and maintenance of the OEIS. We are now in our 61st year, we have over 378,000 sequences, and we’ve reached 11,000 citations (which often say “discovered thanks to the OEIS”).

A078413
Smallest positive integer than cannot be obtained from exactly n copies of n using parentheses and the operations +, -, /, *, ^ and concatenation.
1
2, 2, 5, 13, 18, 89, 243, 475, 1257
OFFSET
1,1
COMMENTS
a(7) >= 192. - Rick L. Shepherd, May 08 2003
From Lars Blomberg, Apr 08 2018: (Start)
The terms a(6)-a(9) have been computed with these rules:
Division by 0 or exponentiation 0^0 is not allowed.
Concatenation where at least one operand is a fraction or where the second operand is negative are skipped.
Exponentiations yielding > 100000 digits or with exponent > 32-bit signed integer are skipped. (End)
EXAMPLE
With three 3's one can form 1=(3/3)^3, 2=3-3/3, 3=3+3-3, 4=3+3/3, but not 5, so a(3)=5.
With four 4's one can get 1=44/44, 2=4/4+4/4, 3=4-(4/4)^4, 4=4+(4-4)^4, 5=4+(4/4)^4, 6=(4+4)/4+4, 7=44/4-4, 8=4+4+4-4, 9=4+4+4/4, 10=(44-4)/4, 11=(4/4) | (4/4), 12=(44+4)/4, but not 13, so a(4)=13 (| denotes concatenation).
With five 5's one can get 1 = (((5 | 5) | 5)^(5 - 5)), 2 = (((5 | 5) - 5) / (5 * 5)), 3 = (((5 * 5) + 5) / (5 + 5)), 4 = (((5 / 5) * 5) - (5 / 5)), 5 = (((5 | 5) * 5) / (5 | 5)), 6 = (((5 | 5) + 5) / (5 + 5)),
7 = (((5 / 5) + 5) + (5 / 5)), 8 = (( 5 + 5) - ((5 + 5) / 5)), 9 = (( 5 + 5) - ((5 / 5)^5)), 10 = (((5 | 5) / 5) - (5 / 5)), 11 = (((5 | 5) / 5)^(5 / 5)), 12 = (((5 | 5) / 5) + (5 / 5)),
13 = (((5 | 5) + (5 + 5)) / 5), 14 = (((5 / 5) | 5) - (5 / 5)), 15 = (((5 / 5) | 5)^(5 / 5)), 16 = (((5 / 5) | 5) + (5 / 5)), 17 = (( 5 | (5^5)) / (5^5)), but not 18, so a(5) = 18.
CROSSREFS
Cf. A078405.
Sequence in context: A208322 A208175 A375446 * A019083 A355863 A029856
KEYWORD
nonn,base,more
AUTHOR
N. J. A. Sloane, Dec 28 2002
EXTENSIONS
a(5) from Frank Ellermann, Dec 30 2002, who finds that a(6) >= 89
a(6)-a(9) from Lars Blomberg, Apr 08 2018
STATUS
approved