It's wild that
such problems are still out there--and that it still takes so much time to solve them!
Mathematicians have finally figured out the three cubed numbers that add up to 42. This has settled a problem that has been pondered for 65 years: namely, can each of the natural numbers below 100 be expressed as the sum of three cubes?
The problem, set in 1954, is exactly what it sounds like: x3+y3+z3=k. K is each of the numbers from 1 to 100; the question is, what are x, y and z?
Over the following decades, solutions were found for the easier numbers. In 2000, mathematician Noam Elkies of Harvard University published an algorithm to help find the harder ones.
By 2019, just the two most difficult ones remained: 33 and 42.
33 took 3 weeks on a supercomputer. If you don't want to click on the link above to learn about 42, I'll cut to the chase here:
It took over a million hours of computing time, but the two mathematicians found their solution.
X = -80538738812075974
Y = 80435758145817515
Z = 12602123297335631
So, the full equation is (-80538738812075974)3 + 804357581458175153 + 126021232973356313 = 42.
So they found the question to the answer? Douglas Adams would be so proud.
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