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March 26, 2019 04:56 pm PDT

A mathematician found a solution to the much-studied problem 33 = x y z

Solving 29 = x+ y+ z is easy (29 = 3 + 1 + 1). Solving 33 = x + y + z has confounded number theorists for a very long time. As far back as 1955, they've been using computers to grind away at a solution. This week, University of Bristol mathematician Andrew Booker's computer program solved it after three weeks of number crunching. The answer: (8,866,128,975,287,528) + (8,778,405,442,862,239) + (2,736,111,468,807,040) = 33.

From Quanta Magazine:

Until Booker found his solution, it was one of only two integers left below 100 (excluding the ones for which solutions definitely dont exist) that still couldnt be expressed as a sum of three cubes. With 33 out of the way, the only one left is 42.

The reason it took so long to find a solution for 33 is that searching far enough up the number line all the way to 1016, or ten quadrillion, and just as far down into the negative integers for the right numerical trio was computationally impractical until Booker devised his algorithm. He has not just run this thing on a bigger computer compared to the computers 10 years ago he has found a genuinely more efficient way of locating the solutions, said Tim Browning, a number theorist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

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Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/xhVQramPHHY/a-mathematician-found-a-soluti.html

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