The Aperiodical 

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Exactly how bad is the 13 times table?

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted March 15, 2018

Let’s recite the $13$ times table. Pay attention to the first digit of each number:

$$\begin{array}{l}13,\\ 26,\\ 39,\\ 52\end{array}$$

What happened to $4$‽

A while ago I was working through the $13$ times table for some boring reason, and I was in the kind of mood to find it really quite vexing that the first digits don’t go $1,2,3,4$. Furthermore, $400÷13\approx 31$, so it takes a long time before you see a 4 at all, and that seemed really unfair.