I am looking for insight into my son Andy's fifth grade homework. The procedure is to reverse the order of digits and add to the original number to get a number that reads the same from left to right as right to left.
Some results are large.
Actually, this problem appeared in an old Scientific American. It has been conjectured that all numbers have palindromes, but the number 196 is the only one less than 10000 that has not yet produced a palindrome. I think 24 iterations should do it, with result 8813200023188. One of my children encountered it in elementary school. The first n that doesn't have a palindrome may be 196.