Palindromes

Palindromes are words or numbers that read the same both forwards and backwards. Examples of words that are palindromes are "noon" and "rotator". An example of a sentence that is a palindrome is "A man, a plan, a canal - Panama!". Palindromic numbers are numbers that read the same forwards and backwards, such as 55 or 3883.

If you have a number that is not a palindrome, you often can create a palindrome by doing the following: Reverse the number's digits and add it to itself, and repeat the process until you get a palindrome. For example, 76 + 67 = 143. 143 + 341 = 484, which is a palindrome.

Do all numbers become palindromes eventually? The answer to this question is not known. 196 is the smallest number for which this process never seems to produce a palindrome. This process has been repeated for a large number of times, even to the point of getting a 70,000-digit number, without any success.