Mathematicians find a completely new way to write the number 3 | Physics - New Scientist News

Donna Lu, New Scientist summarizes, Third time’s a charm: just weeks after cracking an elusive problem involving the number 42, mathematicians have found a solution to an even harder problem for the number 3.

Photo: Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels

Andrew Booker at Bristol University, UK, and Andrew Sutherland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a big solution to a maths problem known as the sum of three cubes.

The problem asks whether any integer, or whole number, can be represented as the sum of three cubed numbers...

It turns out that this rate of growth is extremely small for the number 3 – only 114, now the smallest unsolved number, has a smaller rate of growth. In other words, numbers with a slow rate of growth have fewer solutions with a lower number of digits.

The duo also found a solution to the problem for 906. We know for sure that certain numbers, such as 4, 5 and 13, can’t be expressed as the sum of three cubes. There now remain nine unsolved numbers under 1000. Mathematicians think these can be written as the sum of three cubes, but we don’t yet know how.
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Source: New Scientist News