I heard about these on BBC Radio 4 More or Less and they just intrigued me, perhaps in part because they have no known application! In the past similar obsessions have appeared with the calculation of PI and right back to my childhood calculating powers of 2 on a BBC Micro.
The full definition, as for everything, is on Wikipedia but in short a narcissistic number is one where the sum of the digits raised to the power of the number of digits equals the number itself. For example
\[153 = 1^3 + 5^3 + 3^3\]Here’s some quick and dirty Perl code to calculate them:
use strict;
use warnings;
for (my $i = 10; $i < 10000; $i++) {
my $pwr = length($i);
my $total = 0;
for (my $j = 0; $j < $pwr; $j++) {
$total += int(substr $i, $j, 1) ** $pwr;
}
if ($total == $i) {
print $i . " is narcissistic\n";
}
}
This yields this output
153 is narcissistic
370 is narcissistic
371 is narcissistic
407 is narcissistic
1634 is narcissistic
8208 is narcissistic
9474 is narcissistic
However, due to the typical limitation in the implementation of integers
this doesn’t get you very far. Perl’s Math::BigInt gets you further if
you are very patient
use strict;
use warnings;
use Math::BigInt;
my $i = Math::BigInt->bone();
while ((my $pwr = $i->length()) < 10) {
my $total = Math::BigInt->bzero;
for (my $j = 0; $j < $pwr; $j++) {
my $t = Math::BigInt->new($i->digit($j));
$total->badd($t->bpow($pwr));
}
if ($total == $i) {
print $i . " is narcissistic\n";
}
$i->binc();
}