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@mathteacher Dave was in the cell next to Christopher Havens,????
@mathteacher No cheating; Just very good research on your part. I now remember the P.S. article.
Thanks again and I will let you know about what I find out from Mathematica.
You know, I hate to be a doubting Thomas (well, not really) but if you go here, you’ll find a widget added to Wolfram Alpha in 2010 that calculates the answer. While 1729 is a storied number, I’m not sure that its Pell solution has magical properties. Maybe it is of high-level math paper significance; I guess I need to read the paper.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/view.jsp?id=fce23d652d7daf349cdbef6bda6d6c3f
I ran the Pell’s equation solver solution through the full precision calculator at 800 digits precision and it confirmed y = 1072885712316 is correct. Told ‘ya it is a big number!
Amazing that Bugg’s solution y = 1729*13! was only 9% off, kudos to him.
Well, I did read the paper and it is high-level stuff. It’s loosely related to the Pell equation, but the media made it seem (to me at least) that the paper was about the problem posed.
I stand corrected and will doubt no more.
@mathteacher: That’s it. I saw that article flipping around on the internet and then forgot where I saw it. I knew someone on this board would recover it or at least solve the problem
Actually I was visiting John in the cell next to Christopher Havens.
- Posted by: @mathteacher
I don’t know where Dave got the problem, but here’s one documented source:
https://interestingengineering.com/can-you-solve-this-prison-inmates-viral-math-riddle
The article is dated Feb 26, 2021 (yesterday), so I missed it when Google-cheating several days ago.
- Posted by: @dave-lindell
That or a similar article headline was in one of my news feeds a few days ago and I did not click on it. Missed my chance to be on top of things.
. If you view it as a right triangle with one leg equal to 1 and the other 1727*y^2, the difference between the hypotenuse and the longer leg is about 1.12E-14. That’s 1.12 times 10 to the negative 14.
See, it’s ok to be a foot off if the lines are long enough!
@dave-lindell True Dave but did you have to tell all? Great post on the problem DAVE. Hope you do more.
JOHN
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