A palindromic number or numeral palindrome is a number that remains the same when its digits are reversed. Like 16461, for example, it is "symmetrical". The term palindromic is derived from palindrome, which refers to a word (such as rotor or racecar) whose spelling is unchanged when its letters are reversed. The first 30 palindromic numbers (in decimal) are:
Palindromic numbers receive most attention in the realm of recreational mathematics. A typical problem asks for numbers that possess a certain property and are palindromic. For instance:
Buckminster Fuller identified a set of numbers he called Scheherazade numbers, some of which have a palindromic symmetry of digit groups.
It is fairly straightforward to appreciate that in any base there are infinitely many palindromic numbers, since in any base the infinite sequence of numbers written (in that base) as 101, 1001, 10001, etc. (in which the nth number is a 1, followed by n zeros, followed by a 1) consists of palindromic numbers only.
Although palindromic numbers are most often considered in the decimal system, the concept of palindromicity can be applied to the natural numbers in any numeral system. Consider a number n > 0 in base b ≥ 2, where it is written in standard notation with k+1 digits ai as:
with, as usual, 0 ≤ ai < b for all i and ak ≠ 0. Then n is palindromic if and only if ai = ak−i for all i. Zero is written 0 in any base and is also palindromic by definition.
All numbers in base 10 (and indeed in any base) with one digit are palindromic. The number of palindromic numbers with two digits is 9: