icon

Maths in a minute: Easy 11

Share this page

Maths in a minute: Easy 11

Multiplying 11 by a positive whole number a that's less than 10 is easy. The result is simply a repeated. For example, 11×2=22 11×3=33 11×4=44, and so on.
Eleven

Most people know this, but what's less well-known is that there's also a neat trick to multiply larger numbers by 11. Suppose a is a whole number with two digits. To work out 11×a, simply work out the sum of the digits of a and drop that sum in-between the digits. For example, let a=23. The sum of its digits is 2+3=5. Dropping that sum between the digits gives 253, which is indeed equal to 11×23. There's just one little caveat. If the sum of the digits of a is 10 or larger, you need to carry a digit. In other words, you stick the right-most digit of the sum between the original digits and add the left-most digit of the sum to the original left-most digit. For example, if a=75, then the sum of the digits is 12. We therefore stick a 2 between the original digits 7 and 5 and add a 1 to the 7 to get 825, which again is the correct result. You can convince yourself that this trick always works using long multiplication. Suppose the digits of a are x and y, so a=xy. Long multiplication now tells us that Unknown environment 'tabular' from which our result easily follows. Can you work out the trick for numbers a with more than two digits? As a hint, here is the long multiplication when the digits of a are x1, x2, x3, up to xn: Unknown environment 'tabular'
Read more about...