National Public Radio in the USA carries Car Talk, a humorous phone-in program in which Tom and Ray Magliozzi (Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers) diagnose and offer solutions for mysterious auto-related maladies. One of the program's segments is a weekly Puzzler, a logic (or other) mental puzzle begging for a solution. On May 21, 2011, their Puzzler caught my attention. Here’s the synopsis:

A six-digit odometer shows a palindromic number. The car it's in is driven no more than an hour, and again the odometer shows a palindromic number. How far was the car driven?

Intrigued, I decided to use Maple to solve the problem. I also wrote a blog post describing how I solved it.