{"id":120469,"date":"2021-03-11T20:24:35","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T04:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/after-cracking-the-sum-of-cubes-puzzle-for-42-researchers-discover-a-new-solution-for-3"},"modified":"2021-03-11T20:24:35","modified_gmt":"2021-03-12T04:24:35","slug":"after-cracking-the-sum-of-cubes-puzzle-for-42-researchers-discover-a-new-solution-for-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/after-cracking-the-sum-of-cubes-puzzle-for-42-researchers-discover-a-new-solution-for-3","title":{"rendered":"After cracking the \u2018sum of cubes\u2019 puzzle for 42, researchers discover a new solution for 3"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/after-cracking-the-sum-of-cubes-puzzle-for-42-researchers-discover-a-new-solution-for-3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you\u2019re mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem.<\/p>\n<p>In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to \u201cthe ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything,\u201d as Douglas Adams famously penned in his novel \u201cThe Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy.\u201d The question that begets 42, at least in the novel, is frustratingly, hilariously unknown.<\/p>\n<p>In mathematics, entirely by coincidence, there exists a polynomial equation for which the answer, 42, had similarly eluded mathematicians for decades. The equation x<sup>3<\/sup>+y<sup>3<\/sup>+z<sup>3<\/sup>=k is known as the sum of cubes problem. While seemingly straightforward, the equation becomes exponentially difficult to solve when framed as a \u201cDiophantine equation\u201d\u2014a problem that stipulates that, for any value of k, the values for x, y, and z must each be <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/whole+numbers\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">whole numbers<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you\u2019re mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem. In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,41,2229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-information-science","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}