modular exponentiation?

[Bill Duncan]

A colleague recently posed a question for hiring new programmers..

"What is the least significant 10 digits of the series: 1^1+2^2+3^3 .. 1000^1000" ?

Fairly easy, and I wrote about my solutions here:
billduncan.org.

I flunked the test as my two solutions weren't the java code he was looking for..

It was interesting that "dc" (the command line "reverse polish calculator") had a modular exponentiation operator while the algebraic "bc" command didn't. (At one time, "bc" was a wrapper around "dc", which suggests that this was a recent addition.)

I also got thinking about how I'd solve it on my calculators.. HP-48 wouldn't be a big deal, but it might be tricky on earlier calcs like the HP-41..

Thoughts?

One other thing came to mind, is there a way to insert LaTeX code for formulaes in this forum similar to the way I did it in my blog post?