{"id":120773,"date":"2021-03-21T18:24:14","date_gmt":"2021-03-22T01:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/after-cracking-the-sum-of-cubes-puzzle-for-42-mathematicians-solve-harder-problem-that-has-stumped-experts-for-decades"},"modified":"2021-03-21T18:24:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-22T01:24:14","slug":"after-cracking-the-sum-of-cubes-puzzle-for-42-mathematicians-solve-harder-problem-that-has-stumped-experts-for-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/after-cracking-the-sum-of-cubes-puzzle-for-42-mathematicians-solve-harder-problem-that-has-stumped-experts-for-decades","title":{"rendered":"After Cracking the \u201cSum of Cubes\u201d Puzzle for 42, Mathematicians Solve Harder Problem That Has Stumped Experts for Decades"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/after-cracking-the-sum-of-cubes-puzzle-for-42-mathematicians-solve-harder-problem-that-has-stumped-experts-for-decades.gif\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>The 21-digit solution to the decades-old problem suggests many more solutions exist.<\/strong><\/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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 21-digit solution to the decades-old problem suggests many more solutions exist. 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, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,2229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120773","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\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}