I'm going to ask a rather basic, but still curious question about arithmetic.
It's a widely known fact that any number has a unique representation in place-value summands. For example, a number $137$ can be represented as $100 + 30 + 7$. Now that I think about it, there should exist a similar approach to represent any number in place-value subtrahends.
To illustrate what I mean clearly, I'll take the same number, $137$. I'll represent it in the following way: $137 = 1000 - 800 - 60 - 3$.
The minuend will always be a place-value term that will have one more digit than the number of digits in the number we want to represent. $100 < 137 < 1000$, so the minuend will be $1000$.
What is the intuitive approach to determine each subtrahend to get that representation? Can someone elaborate the algorithm behind it?