Any number where the individual digits add up to a number divisible by ‘3’ is divisible by 3.
51 = 5+1 = 6, which is divisible by three.
Try it, you’ll see it always works.
I knew that worked with 9. Hmm, does it work with 6?
Doesn’t look like it.
There are tricks like that for a lot of numbers. For 7, chop off the last digit, double it and add it to what’s left. Repeat as required. If the result is divisible by 7 then the original number was. eg: 356 -> 35+12=47 not db7. 357 =>35+14 both db7 so we don’t even need to do the add.
You clearly mean:
14: 1 + 8 = 9 (not db 7)
Someone else in this thread correctly stated:
“Chop of last digit, double it and subtract from what is left”
14: 1 - 8 = -7. (dB 7!)
Math is awesome, I didn’t know this trick!
One of the reasons why I love the number 3. There are other neat digit sum tricks, see for example for the numbers 1 to 30 here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisibility_rule
They didn’t teach stuff like this in school, which is silly. This is the kind of thing that a kid would eat up. It’s like they wanted to make sure people hated math.
I guess I was one of the lucky few who learned this in elementary school. And later again.
My experience of maths in high school was being taught a trick or method to solve a really specific type of problem every week. Sometimes the method would build off something we’d learnt the previous week.
The whole thing was bottom-up learning where you get given piecemeal nuggets of information but never see the big picture. They completely lost me at around the age of 15. I eventually came back to maths later in life after studying formal logic in my philosophy undergrad degree.
