... is Kaprekar’s constant, named after the Indian mathematician (below) who found it.
Take any four-digit number, 5634 and rearrange the digits in decreasing order, to get 6543.
Reverse this number and you get 3456.
Now subtract the smaller number from the larger, 6543-3456. You get 3087.
Now repeat the process.
Rearrange the digits 3087 in decreasing order, 8730. Reverse the number, 0378. Subtract the smaller number from the larger, 8730-0378 to get 8352.
Now repeat the process again using 8352. Rearrange 8352 in decreasing order to get 2538. Reverse 2538 to get 8352. Subtract, 8352-2358 to get 6174.
Now repeat the process again. Rearrange 6174 in decreasing order to get 1467. Reverse 1467 to get 7641. Now subtract the smaller number from the larger, 7641-1467 to get... 6174!
Now try it with any other four-digit number. What happens if you use a three-digit or five-digit number?
Shri Dattathreya Ramachandra Kaprekar was born on January 17, 1905 at a place called Dahanu, near Mumbai, in India.
As a child calculations were his hobby. He would spend hours trying to solve maths puzzles and problems.
As an adult he worked as a mathematician and in 1946 he discovered the Kaprekar constant — the number 6174.
He died in 1988.