42 is found to be the sum of three cubes (twitter.com)

Article summary

The number 42 has been found to be the sum of three cubes, a discovery made by Andrew Booker at Bristol and Andrew Sutherland at MIT. This breakthrough was achieved through computational methods and has implications for the study of sums of three cubes. The remaining unsolved cases up to 1000 are now 114, 165, 390, 579, 627, 633, 732, 906, 921, and 975. The discovery of 42 being the sum of three cubes has shed new light on the conjecture that every whole number can be expressed as the sum of three cubes, except for those of the form 9k+4 or 9k+5.

Main themes

• sums of three cubes
• mathematical discoveries
• computational breakthroughs
• number theory
• conjectures in mathematics

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