Here’s a curious way to split a product of two integers into two summands:
n · (b - 1) = (n - 1) · b + (b - n)
For example, for n=3 and b=10,
3 · 9 = 2 · 10 + 7
Now since we can consider
(n - 1) · 1 + (b - n) = b - 1
where the n cancels out on the right hand side, we have the following
